Scottish Widows completes migration of millions of accounts to TCS platform

Scottish Widows has moved 3.8 million customer accounts and pension data from multiple legacy systems to a cloud-based platform from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

It worked with the Indian supplier’s subsidiary Diligenta on the migration to the TCS BaNCS software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. The pension provider, part of Lloyds Banking Group, also rolled out a wealth administration platform from TCS, and in the process migrated nearly a million retail customer investment portfolios.  

Donald MacKechnie, a Scottish Widows COO, said: “We have reached an important milestone in our transformation programme and our ongoing relationship with Diligenta and TCS. We look forward to continuing to enhance customer experience by providing customers with better and faster service enabled by digitisation.” 

Account migrations are important landmarks for finance firms because moving customer accounts from legacy to cloud systems is necessary for modern digital financial services. But migrating customer accounts in the finance sector is also a hugely risky project. “It’s still a very difficult, complicated, risky thing to do,” said one senior IT professional in the finance sector.

Reputational damage and regulatory fines can follow if things go wrong, with TSB’s failed migration in 2018 being a good example. Disaster struck TSB customers in 2018, when it moved customer accounts from Lloyds Bank systems, which hosted them, to a UK version of Sabadell’s in-house-developed core system known as Proteo4UK. In April that year, the migration experienced major problems. Over a five-day period, users were locked out, experienced money disappearing and some were even able to see other customers’ accounts.

All of TSB’s branches and a significant proportion of its 5.2 million customers were affected by the initial issues. Some customers continued to be affected by issues, and it took until December 2018 for TSB to return to business as usual.

The UK regulator fined TSB nearly £50m for its failures, and the bank paid £32.7m in redress to customers who suffered detriment. It also fined TSB’s former CIO, Carlos Abarca, £81,620 for his part in the catastrophic migration of the bank’s IT to a new system.

TCS has built a strong life and pensions business in the UK. It strengthened its UK operation though the acquisition of life and pension outsourcing business Pearl Group in 2005 and then set up Diligenta to help it grow in life and pensions BPO.

In the UK, it delivers pensions, including The National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) and the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. Its BaNCS cloud products spans the wider financial sector, including banking, capital markets and insurance.