TSB Bank customers were unable to access their accounts on Thursday after its app went down, as the company was also fined £10.9 million by regulators for its treatment of people in financial difficulty.
According to Down Detector, outages were first reported at about 7am on Thursday and were still trickling in during the early afternoon, with thousands of reports logged by 1pm.
TSB acknowledged the problem this morning, posting on X, formerly Twitter: “We’re sorry that some of our customers are facing problems accessing our services this morning. Our teams are working to resolve this.”
Later on Thursday afternoon, TSB said the issues affecting some customers earlier in the day had been fixed.
People had been posting on X about the problems, reporting that they were unable to send and receive funds.
One person said: “How long is this going to take? Very embarrassing going to make a payment and having to apologise and say you’ll send later. I feel like a liar.”
Another posted: “@TSB are seriously the worst bank in history. The app is always bloody broken. Go to pay my rent this morning, and can’t. 20+ years with them, and never any rewards. Pile of shite.”
And a third wrote: “Absolute crap for online app banking. Always flipping down.
“Maintenance after maintenance and you still can’t get shit right. Don’t even fake a sorry response to me. Just sort this crap out and give us compensation for this shit show”.
One user posted a picture of their TSB app which said: “We’re updating our app at the moment to make it better for our customers. Sorry, but this means you can’t get into the app right now. We’re working as hard as we can to have it up and running shortly.”
The apparent outage compounded headaches for the high street bank on Thursday after it was fined by the Financial Conduct Authority for failing to treat customers in financial difficulty fairly over a six-year period.
The bank has paid nearly £100 million in redress to more than 230,000 mortgage, overdraft, credit card and loan customers found to have been affected.
The FCA said the bank’s “woeful systems and controls exposed its customers to risk of harm”.
Between June 2014 and March 2020, TSB was found to have inadequate training for staff who were in charge of agreeing repayment plans for customers in arrears.
Staff were potentially encouraged by incentive schemes to prioritise the number of plans they made over taking the time to understand individual circumstances and set realistic repayment plans.
TSB’s woeful systems and controls exposed its customers to risk of harm and meant it missed opportunity after opportunity to do the right thing
Therese Chambers, the FCA
This meant TSB risked agreeing unaffordable payment arrangements with people in difficulty or charging them inappropriate fees, according to the regulator’s findings.
It said this could have heightened uncertainty and stress, including for vulnerable customers.
Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: “If you get into difficulty, you hope for – and we expect – fair treatment so a stressful situation isn’t made worse.
“TSB’s woeful systems and controls exposed its customers to risk of harm and meant it missed opportunity after opportunity to do the right thing.
“While it did take action, it took us instigating a review before it acted effectively to address all the issues.”
These are historic issues, and we have contacted all affected customers to apologise and reimburse them for not providing the level of service we should have
TSB
The FCA said TSB became aware of potential problems with its system in December 2016, but it did not take effective action to fully address them until the review was opened in 2020.
Nevertheless, TSB would have been fined £15.6 million but because it worked closely with the FCA to fix its systems and redress customers, the fine was cut by 30%.
The bank has finished a comprehensive programme to address the issues, costing it £105 million.
A spokesman for TSB said: “These are historic issues, and we have contacted all affected customers to apologise and reimburse them for not providing the level of service we should have.
“We fixed the underlying issues some time ago and have considerably enhanced our support for customers experiencing financial difficulty.”