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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

They announced this week they are going to bring IBM in to help resolve the problems, somehow that doesn't fill me with confidence.

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The team at TSB must be utterly incompetent, if the alternative of bringing in a new team, with absolutely no knowledge of the systems or what has been done in the last 18 months, is thought to have a better chance at working. That's the message I get.

More likely, IBM will install a standard COTS banking software platform, migrate data where they can, and declare success. If account balances match, that will be enough. Desired functionality, either for internal users or customers, will be secondary.

And that's probably what TSB should have done from the beginning, minus the IBM involvement. That hasn't worked well historically, based on the number of lawsuits against then for failing to deliver contracted systems.

> The bank’s boss, Paul Pester, said TSB will waive £10m in overdraft fees and pay extra interest on current accounts. He has hired a new team of IT experts from IBM who have been told the problems must be fixed by Saturday.

(a quote from a different article).

This guy is an absolute joke. Just because you want something fixed quickly doesn't mean it's gong to happen. Bringing in an outside team is already a REALLY bad sign, but demanding an outside team to get up to speed and to implement a complete fix in two days? Yikes.

Now they have N+1 problems.

This could even be 2*N.

(N^N)!

But now a third-party scapegoat which would take the heat off of TSB execs.

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