TSB to close Sidcup branch as part of national branch cuts
TSB have announced that Sidcup is one of 82 branches to close.
The bank made major mistakes with an IT upgrade resulting in customers being unable to access accounts.
370 jobs are being cut across the country.
That’s very sad news particularly for customers without the means to access Internet services. Many older customers in particular rely on a local branch for their services as much as human interaction and routine, and for small villages where this may be the only bank, the loss is even more devastating.
I’m not surprised that IT problems rears its ugly head here. When the Lloyds TSB merger happened in 2000 I was one of the engineers overseeing the merging of the ATM systems (in those days no more than glorified printers). In short order our small engineering firm had polished off not only the plans for branch upgrades but also tested the software, the patches and everything necessary to get the branches talking.
At that point we were fired (we couldn’t afford to contest a dry cleaners let alone two banks) and the contract went to HP. What was originally budgeted as a two-man job over a Sunday at £22 per person per hour (we got £11.80) became a weekend job for a team of 3 billed at £800 a day per engineer. HP also wanted full upgrades from the old IBM desktops to their own models. And this is before the advent of overly complex software, cloud based services and mobile apps. Coupled with a huge decrease in real, thinking engineers, its no wonder the banks often fall foul of upgrades – and the firms who peddle them.
Absolutely agree with you Charles the elderly disabled and vulnerable people need front line services at local branches. The digital agenda as gone to far and as left us wide open to fraud and cyber attacks on our accounts and companies. Elderly and disabled people struggle with these too,
There is far to much automation in the modern work place. Self service and self scan checkouts are a nightmare and open to abuse.
We need jobs and good face to face customer services not computers all the time.
Agreed entirely: it seems that more and more companies prefer to use robots and a human attendant rather than thinking human beings. The new self-scanners at Sainsburys are a case in point: for the sake of having a running tally of your spend (adding up as you go along also works) and a few extra points you’re promoting a technology that will enable Sainsburys to make dozens maybe hundreds of staff redundant claiming that the public prefers self-service. Yet nobody grabbing the scanner thinks that the person explaining how it works may lose their job because of it.
Here’s the short-sighted part: if companies carry on making people redundant for the sake of pleasing the shareholder’s profits, who will be left to buy from them?
I went to use the little Lloyds Bank branch in Welling this morning only to find this branch as already closed/. Such a shame being on a busy High Street.
Again it will be the elderly disabled and vulnerable that will suffer the most by these bank branch closures not everyone can use or even feel safe using on line services. AS we are all more open to on line fraud.