Ulster Bank deals with ‘unprecedented’ backlog

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Ulster Bank’s payment processing issues have left the bank with what it has termed an ‘unprecedented’ backlog in processing customer payments.

The underlying issue has been resolved, the bank said but other technical issues have been identified as a result and are now being dealt with, along with the backlog that has built up.

It has been reported by the Independent in the UK, that a on the night of Tuesday 19 June, a software patch was applied to a RBS payments processing system. This results in corruption of the system. The RBS group systems also serve Ulster Bank in Ireland and so it experienced the same difficulties.

Ellvena Graham, chief operations officer, Ulster Bank has apologised unreservedly for the problems being faced by Ulster bank customers.

The Ulster Bank situation is in stark contrast to UK building society  Nationwide which has said that it re-launched its online banking system having it tested it solely within a virtual environment.

Nationwide has revealed that it was able to successfully re-launch its internet banking website based solely on testing in a virtual environment.

The system is now in place six months, with no operational problems.

“We haven’t had a single performance-related defected since the six months’ launch. That was done against a virtualised service and it’s gone live and worked,” said Andy Armstrong, head of technical testing at Nationwide.

“There are about 36 systems we integrate with to provide the [internet] bank to our customers. We had to do performance testing against the environments [but] to do testing in a real environment would have been expensive – it needs a lot of resources,” said Armstrong.

The company ended up using CA’s service virtualisation product LISA in order to carry out the testing in a virtual environment.

UPDATE: TheRegister.co.uk is reporting that the Ulster Bank issues that have been attributed to a failed software update in RBS group systems, may have been exacerbated by recently outsourced support.

The web site reports that insiders have indicated that the patch failure and recovery would likely have been a relatively trivial issue had not support in this area recently been outsourced offshore.

TechCentral Reporters

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