News / Bank apologises to local woman for IT blunder
TSB has said it will apologise to a Shetland customer who was left out of pocket by almost one thousand pounds and had her credit card cancelled due to an internal IT blunder.
Sue Beer, from Walls, said she was grateful that the matter appears to have been resolved but added she was “disappointed” that it needed the press to make inquiries before TSB would move into taking action.
Beer, who has been a customer with TSB for more than 40 years, was shocked when she found her TSB visa card had been cancelled earlier this month despite having made a credit card payment of £969.73 from her current account, also with TSB, on 5 July.
When contacting the bank’s customer service helpline she was told that due to an IT problem on 5 July it would take weeks for her payment to re-emerge, and that she had no choice but to make another transfer in order to get her credit card “unstopped”.
Beer said: “I have been told that I will get a letter within eight weeks but that there was nothing the (very polite) customer service staff, who acknowledged that the payment had been taken, were able to do, and that it was a known IT issue for that date” (5 July).
She added that she was disappointed that TSB had failed to contact her in advance to advise of the IT issue, as this could have prevented her from embarrassment and inconvenience when attempting to use her credit card to pay for a meal on 21 July.
TSB would not say how many customers were affected nationally by what was described as a “processing issue, but it insisted that only a “small number” of customers had suffered a similar experience.
A spokeswoman for the company said: “We are really sorry to hear about what happened to our customer.
“We are in the process of contacting her so that we can not only apologise, but also so that we can compensate her for any distress or inconvenience she has suffered as a result of this.”
The bank confirmed that the payment had now gone through and would be backdated to when Beer had originally made the payment “so that she is not charged any additional interest”.
The “issue was isolated to one day and has been fully rectified”, the bank said.
Responding to the bank’s promise to apologise, Beer said she was grateful for the help received from Shetland News but added: “I am disappointed that it appears that it should take contact from the press before any action was taken.”
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