Yesterday we announced the culmination of a major internal and regulatory investigation into our June 2012 IT incident. The resulting fines of £56m settled a tough issue from the past that we knew was coming. I for one am pleased that we have now reached settlement with our regulators on this.
The incident in 2012 was extremely serious. It revealed unacceptable weaknesses in the bank’s systems and caused significant stress for many customers. As we did at the time, we again want to apologise to all of the customers in UK and Ireland who we let down.
It was my priority when I arrived at RBS last year to ensure that investment in IT was targeted in the right areas. As a result, we are investing £750m to enhance the security and resilience of our systems over three years.
Significant changes have been made to ensure that it is now highly unlikely that a similar incident could happen again and to ensure that when things do go wrong recovery is much quicker, reducing inconvenience for customers.
As a result of these actions and others our systems are currently available more than 99.9% of the time. But, given the impact that any incident has on our customers, we continually strive to do better.
There is still much work to be done. We will continue to invest in the right areas to build stronger and more resilient IT systems that our customers can have confidence in. Customer trust is at the heart of our plan to rebuild RBS and central to that is ensuring we do everything we can to mimimise the chances of our customers experiencing anything like this again.
