Royal Bank of Scotland will invest around £150 million a year to improve the resilience of its computer systems, chief administration officer Simon McNamara said on Thursday.

The bank was hit by an IT failure on Wednesday which led to 600,000 customer transactions not being processed, resulting in thousands of customers missing out on payments such as wages and benefits.

While no customers in the Republic were impacted by the issue, a number in Northern Ireland found that payments were delayed.

The bank had said last year it would invest an extra £750 million in the security and resilience of its IT systems by the end of 2015 to prevent a recurrence of its past problems.

Mr McNamara said that investment had left it better placed to deal with failures but the incident this week had showed there is more work to do.

“Technology will on occasion fail. 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,” he said.

Reuters