The Prudential Regulation Authority has fined former TSB Bank plc chief information officer Carlos Abarca £81,629 for his part in IT failings which hit 5.2m TSB customers. 

The fine against Mr Abarca follows an earlier fine of £48.65m imposed on TSB Bank in December.

It took TSB over six months to restore normal service to some customers after the failings occurred.

Some 5.2m TSB customers were affected by the failings and the bank has paid £32.7m in redress to customers.

The PRA said it imposed the fine because Mr Abarca failed to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that TSB adequately managed and supervised appropriately the outsourcing of its 2018 IT migration programme.

In December 2022 TSB was fined by the PRA and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for operational resilience failings. A joint penalty of £48.65m was imposed.

Mr Abarca has been fined for breaching PRA Senior Manager Conduct Rule 2. As chief information officer (CIO) of TSB, he was responsible for TSB complying with the PRA’s outsourcing rules.

The PRA said that, in particular, he was responsible for TSB’s key outsourcing relationship with its main third-party supplier for the IT migration programme. As part of this, he gave assurances to the TSB board that the third party, as key supplier, was prepared for migration.

However, he failed to ensure that TSB had itself obtained sufficient assurance from the third party before doing so.

Sam Woods, deputy governor for Prudential Regulation and chief executive officer of the PRA, said: “Senior managers have an essential role to play in ensuring that firms manage and supervise outsourcing effectively. In this case, the PRA has fined Mr Abarca because his management of a key outsourcing relationship fell below the standard we expect.”

In April 2018, TSB updated its IT systems and migrated the data for its corporate and customer services to a new IT platform. While the data itself was migrated successfully, the platform immediately experienced technical failures. This resulted in significant disruption to TSB’s banking services, including branch, telephone, online and mobile banking.

The PRA said all of TSB’s branches and a significant proportion of its 5.2m customers were affected by the initial issues. Some customers continued to be affected by some issues and it took until December 2018 for TSB to return to business-as-usual.