Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Ulster Bank chief executive Jim Brown has put a cynical price on the inconvenience his 600 000 customers suffered from the bank’s IT system outage that denied them access to their accounts for at least six weeks.

After inexplicably delaying for over a month, Ulster Bank finally announced its long promised and “simple” customer compensation plan (pdf) last Friday. Wilde would have surely questioned the bank’s earnestness. [read more..]