Mr. Ciarán Coyle:

I thank the Senator for the question. I can give some context. As the Senator might imagine, we are constantly updating and upgrading our systems across RBS and Ulster Bank. We typically tend to do it over the course of a weekend. The weekend preceding this customer issue, a change was made in RBS in the UK that was specifically for the UK. It was linked to a regulatory change there that was different from our regulatory environment.

The change was confined to the UK. A UK operator was involved in the change over the weekend. There is a schedule of events that take place over the two or three days or the over the course of the weekend. At one point, in that change over the weekend, the operator made a genuine human error that inadvertently impacted Ulster Bank. I shall explain the error to the committee in order to help members understand what happened. The operator, even though he or she should not have done so, inadvertently took down a part of the process within Ulster Bank that transmits files in our overnight batch system. I am happy to answer follow-on questions on that point but I shall keep it at this level for now. The operator inadvertently took it down but did not re-enable it properly. Due to that specific act an issue unfolded from early morning on Tuesday, 24 April. As Mr. Stanley has said, once we became aware of the issue our priority was to respond as quickly as possibly but first we tried to understand the problem. As one can imagine, the environment is complex so one must first understand the extent of the issue. All of our other systems, such as branch and mobile systems, behaved normally that morning. We quickly set about understanding and containing the problem. Once we had done so we knew what we had to do to fix the problem over the course of that evening. We discussed whether to fix it intraday, during the business day, or fix it overnight. Again, I am happy to explain all of that to the Senator.

I want to clearly point out the following to the committee and our customers. It is totally unacceptable that this happened. I understand the impact it had on our customers and their concern about balances being moved. My friends and family asked me what happened so I genuinely understand the matter. I am sorry that this incident happened to our customers. I thank our staff who are located up and down the country in various branches, telephony centres and business centres who worked diligently to deal with the issue over the course of 24 hours.

We set about resolving the issue and resolved it that night. As the Senator would expect, we commenced a review subsequently. The review is ongoing because we want to thoroughly examine this matter. We have put in place specific controls that will ensure that if such an error occurs in the future it will be caught, or we would be alerted to same, before it had an impact on our customers.

I shall pause there, if that is okay. I am happy to answer follow-on questions.