Royal Bank of Scotland is to invest a further £150 million a year to improve the resilience of its IT systems, in the wake of the latest breakdown which saw 600,000 transactions disappear from customer acounts.
The pledge to increase the resilience spend was made at an investor presentation by chief administrative officer Simon McNamara.
The meeting, complete with a slide deck boasting about the bank's technology achievements over the course of the past year, came just a day after an overnight processing failure hit salary, benefit and bill payments and other debit and credit transactions in customer accounts.
The deck talked of the bank's plans to reduce complexity by rationalising IT systems, retro-fitting legacy architecture, reducing supplier count, and investmentment in Ripple technology for automated bank transfers.
McNamara said the past year's efforts - which included remediation of single points of failure for 23 critical systems and the reduction of 500 programmes to under 200 in the past 12 months - had left it better placed to deal with Tuesday's incident.
“Technology will on occasion fail," he said. "If and when that occurs, we need to ensure we can mask the impact on customers and recover as quickly and effectively as possible. It is important that it is handled well and competently."