TSB calls in City law firm to investigate IT platform migration disaster ahead of Parliamentary grilling

Slaughter & May appointed to investigate TSB's disastrous IT platform migration

City law firm Slaughter & May has been appointed to investigate the reasons for TSB's disastrous IT platform migration - a move made ahead of a grilling in front of the Treasury Select Committee for the bank's CEO Paul Pester and chairman Richard Meddings.

TSB was spun-off from Lloyds Bank in 2013 and acquired by Spain's Banco Sabadell less than two years later. The IT migration was intended to take the bank and its customers off of Lloyds Bank's systems and onto the IT used by its parent.

However, the migration, which was supposed to have occurred from around 4pm on Friday 20 April and be completed by the afternoon of Sunday 22 April, caused a series of outages and glitches, with online banking still down two weeks later.

Most of the bank's customers were Lloyds Bank customers shifted over to TSB as part of the aftermath of Lloyds' disastrous acquisition of HBOS during the global financial crisis. As such, many have pledged to dump the bank - as soon as they can get back control of their accounts.

Customer are also angry about the inadequate communication from the bank, which has repeatedly asserted that systems and access to accounts have been restored when customers say that they haven't.

Furthermore, as a result of the outage, some customers claim that, for example, house moves have fallen through, and that other payments have gone awry.

More technical customer have highlighted basic errors in TSB's online banking login pages highlighting, for example, SSL certificates that will very soon be considered unsafe by Google and other web browser makers.

The news today that TSB is bringing in Slaughter & May to investigate the IT disaster comes after it last week announced that it was bringing in IBM to help clear-up the mess.

It said that IBM had been brought in to attempt to resolve ongoing performance issues with its new servers that the organisation had acquired to support the major project.