Ulster Bank has apologised to its customers and customers of other banks for the technical problems that have affected the bank over the past weeks.
The chief executive of Ulster Bank, Jim Brown, told the Oireachtas Finance Committee today that the situation was ''unacceptable''.
Mr Brown confirmed that no customer would be left out of pocket and employees were working flat out to resume a normal service.
He said the problems had been unprecedented in terms of complexity and challenges in restoring service.
He said that next week - starting on July 9 - would be the last week of significant delays for Ulster Bank customers. He added that by the week starting July 16, normal services would have resumed for most.
The bank CEO told the committee that Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns Ulster Bank, would carry out a detailed examination of what went wrong and publish them once the restoration and recovery phase was over. He added that the bank was working closely with regulators.
Mr Brown said that since the crisis began, the bank had provided an additional 1,659 hours of branch opening time including Saturdays and Sundays in the Republic.
He told the committee that 167,000 customers were spoken to directly in the branch network, while call centre staff and capacity had been increased by increased by 300%.
There were 1.3 million visits to the Ulster Bank website, a 90% increase on business as normal volumes. He also said there were 174,000 views on the bank's system incident question and answer pages on its website.
Jim Brown said that over the last few days "over 100 resources" had been flown in from the UK. He also said that he would be happy to receive specific customer problems received by the TDS.
The Finance Committee was told that around half of the bank's 1.1 million customers had been affected, a considerable increase on early estimates. He said this was due to the compounding of the backlog as the crisis wore on
Mr Brown said the bank was looking at what other compensation should be made over and above restituting accounts and fees. Getting something out sooner rather than later was important, he added.
The bank chief executive said Ulster had been in the market for 167 years and his aim was to get the service levels back to where customers expect them to be and get back to serving the economy.
Brown declines to rule out his bonus payment
The chief executive of Ulster Bank has declined to rule out accepting a bonus for 2012 if it is determined that he is eligible for one.
Jim Brown said a decision on whether to take a bonus, if one awarded, would be a judgement call he would make at the end of the year. He said the technical issues and their resolutions would be part of the consideration.
He had been asked his position on a bonus by Fianna Fail's Michael McGrath. Deputy McGrath said it was astounding, and beyond belief, that he would consider accepting a bonus.
Fine Gael's Kieran O'Donnell urged Mr Brown to declare that he would not accept his bonus.
RBS executive talks compensation for customers
Royal Bank of Scotland has said that as well as Ulster Bank customers, members of other banks which were indirectly affected by the crisis at the bank, will be compensated.
Chris Sullivan, CEO of RBS Corporate Banking Division, said procedural reasons meant that Ulster could only be addressed once issues had been resolved at both at RBS and NatWest first.
"Unfortunately though the systematic processes Ulster were last in the queue, there was absolutely no prioritisation other than the one that was required by the system," he said.
"Because of that Ulster Bank went past a single day, and then various days became involved in the overall process which caused a corruption of data." he said.
"All of that data had to be manually corrected, and as this was happening, and it took a number of days, transactions were just building up."
Mr Sullivan said that it was now believed that problems would be resolved for most customers by the week starting July 16.
He said, however, that this was an informed estimate rather than a certainty.
"It’s only fair to say that we have to work at the estimates given to us by the experts who run the systems." he said, "We made statements early on based on early predictions."
''As they've got to understand the problems more and as we've got more data based on the way that we are repairing the system, we've got more certainty to be able to give an end date, which we believe is the latest date and hopefully we can get inside that," the RBS executive said.
Mr Sullivan said that his bonus would be independently assessed and he could not say at this time whether or not he would forfeit it following the crisis.
"My bonus is based off a four year performance. It won't be looked at until next year by an independent part of the bank. I have focused all of my attention, from the minute I heard about the problem, to coming over here to Ireland to try and solve this problem and so I won't even think about that until later next year and I'll think of that in the cold light of day."
