Under intense pressure from customers and others for an IT failure, which affected the transactions of millions of customers, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has said there is no link to its outsourcing programme to India.
Outsourcing IT and other jobs to India by banks and other institutions has often been in public focus, since they invariably lead to job losses in Britain.
There have also been doubts about the security of U.K. data sent to India.
Millions of customers could not complete their transactions with the RBS for the last one week after a computer software upgrade failed, disrupting payments into and out of accounts.
The RBS said most of the backlog of transactions had been cleared, leaving less than one per cent unresolved.
However, opponents of outsourcing to India have used the RBS’ IT problems to once again raise questions about sending work and jobs to India, with reports stating that the support team for the bank’s computer software was based in India.
The RBS is one of the major banks that was rescued by the taxpayer in 2008 during the banking crisis.
Since the bailout, it has reportedly shed nearly 30,000 jobs, including more than 20,000 U.K.-based roles, and has outsourced them abroad, including to India.
The bank said work was on to resolve the problem and that only “a few specific sets of transactions” were outstanding.
The RBS said: “It is possible a small number of customers may experience delays as we return to a completely normal service’’. The Unite union, who has often opposed outsourcing to India, questioned whether the off-shoring had left the bank unable to cope after the software failure, but the RBS consistently denied that the decision to relocate jobs to India had made any difference at all to its handling of the situation.
