BankingRoyal Bank of Scotland's chief executive has pledged to waive his bonus this year after a computer systems failure left millions of customers at the UK bank and its subsidiary, Ulster Bank, without access to their accounts.
The promise has made Stephen Hester the second chief of a large UK bank to forgo his bonus this week after Bob Diamond came out with a similar move in conjunction with Barclays’ admission that it had attempted to rig a benchmark interest rate.
“I think it’s inappropriate for me to have a bonus this year. We have let our customers down,” Mr Hester told the BBC yesterday.
RBS has struggled to resolve a backlog of tens of millions of transactions after a failed software update disrupted the bank’s processing systems more than a week ago.
“That may have arisen from old systems and things that were before my time, but I think we could reasonably be expected to have improved things since then and clearly we didn’t improve them enough, so it wouldn’t cross my mind to have a bonus this year,” Mr Hester said. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012)
