The former CIO of TSB Bank has been fined over £80,000 for his role in a problematic IT migration programme in 2018 that resulted in customers being locked out of their accounts for several weeks and caused ongoing technical issues for months.
The migration was supposed to move the data for TSB's corporate and customer services to a new IT platform from its parent company, Banco Sabadell. However, technical problems arose immediately, causing major disruptions to TSB's banking services. The Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority fined TSB a combined £48.6 million in December 2018. The PRA has now fined former CIO Carlos Abarca for failing to ensure that TSB had obtained adequate assurance from the third party supplier before migrating the data. Abarca agreed to pay a reduced fine of £81,620 after resolving the issue with the PRA.