NatWest has admitted that it could not say exactly how much money should be in individual accounts as the crisis caused by a failed software update last week spiralled out of control for days.
The bank was quick to deny claims by the Unite union that the "offshoring" of IT jobs to locations in India had led to the the problems which appeared on Tuesday night and which paralysed its systems through to Friday, and which have not yet been fixed.
However a number of programmers and experts who have worked on or with NatWest systems told the Guardian that they could not imagine the problem happening in the period before the redundancies of experienced staff since 2010.
"[NatWest owner] Royal Bank of Scotland has 40 years' experience running these systems and banks as a rule don't drop the ball like this," one said. "Somebody somewhere made a decision that has led to this."
The Guardian's investigations suggest that NatWest's problems began on Tuesday night when it updated a key piece of software - CA-7, which controls the batch processing systems that deal with retail banking transactions - ahead of the regular nightly run.
RBS/NatWest has not said what went wrong, though one programmer who has worked on RBS/NatWest's systems told the Guardian:... Source/Origin >> Read More
