(Adds further detail from PRA, background)
LONDON, April 13 (Reuters) - The Bank of England said on
Thursday it had fined TSB Bank's former chief information
officer Carlos Abarca 81,620 pounds ($102,115) for failing to
adequately manage an IT migration in 2018 which led to
disruption for millions of customers.
The sanction is a rare example of a fine for a breach of UK
rules aimed at making senior managers at banks directly
accountable for their actions, brought in after the global
financial crisis more than a decade ago and now being reviewed.
"The PRA has fined Mr Abarca because his management of a key
outsourcing relationship fell below the standard we expect,"
said Sam Woods, the BoE deputy governor in charge of the central
bank's supervisory arm, the Prudential Regulation Authority.
The PRA said Abarca agreed to resolve the matter, and
therefore qualified for a 30% reduction in the overall fine,
which would otherwise have been 116,000 pounds.
TSB, owned by Spain's Sabadell , was fined 48.65
million pounds in December by the PRA and Financial Conduct
Authority over the botched IT platform migration that locked
millions of its customers out of their accounts.
The PRA said Abarca, who had responsibility for complying
with the PRA's outsourcing rules, failed to take reasonable
steps to ensure that TSB adequately managed and supervised
appropriately its outsourcing arrangement in relation to its
2018 IT migration programme.
"As part of this, he gave assurance 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."
Reuters was not immediately able to contact Abarca for a
response to the PRA fine.
TSB, which updated its IT systems in April 2018 but took
until December of that year to return to business-as-usual, has
paid 32.7 million pounds to customers hit by the migration.
($1 = 0.7993 pounds)
(Reporting by David Milliken and Huw Jones; editing by William
James and Alexander Smith)
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