UK bank Abbey said anIT upgradethat caused problems for
customers this week is related to an ongoing transformational
programme.
Some
Abbey
small business customers were not able to see or make
transactions on certain accounts as systems were upgraded.
"As part of Abbey's ongoing transformational programme, we have
been upgrading our systems to provide our customers with better
services and facilities," said an Abbey statement.
"As part of the upgrade, our active online customers have been
required to register again to access to their secure internet site.
The majority have done so successfully - however, for a small
number of customers, for instance, those with linked accounts, if
they have only re-registered for their main account, they are not
able to see or transact on the other accounts," it said.
The bank is currently involved in a transformational project to
migrate IT systems to the Partenon global banking platform of its
parent, which has caused some problems for customers in the past.
In November last year
services to customers were disrupted as it grappled with
migrating to the new banking system.
Although the core project is complete there are smaller projects
on its periphery. It will also migrate its
Bradford & Bingleyand
Alliance & Leicester acquisitions to the platform.
The project moves the bank from running separate systems that
support different parts of the business to a single platform that
can collate all the data about each customer. Once complete, the
upgrade that caused the problems this week will enable "businesses
to view all of their accounts via a single log-on", according to
Abbey. The bank said the systems are now getting back to normal and
added that "noone will be financially impacted by this".
During the Partenon project the bank moved its 10 million
savings accounts, four million current accounts and eight million
card accounts to the new platform.
The bank has renewed its branch communications network by
building more than 45 portals for 26,000 employees and third-party
organisations, and has also created a back-up datacentre.