Sir Mervyn calls for probe on RBS glitch The governor of the Bank of England has called for a "very detailed" investigation by the Financial Services Authority into a systems failure at Royal Bank of Scotland that left millions of customers without access to their bank accounts. The mostly state-owned bank has come under increased pressure in recent days after a software update blocked its payment processing systems and triggered a backlog of transactions that was not yet fully cleared on Tuesday. "Once the current difficulties are over, then we will need the FSA to go in and carry out a very detailed investigation to find out, first of all, what went wrong and then perhaps even more importantly why it took so long to recover," Sir Mervyn King, BoE governor, said at the Treasury Committee. He added it was one of the things that made him believe there was merit in splitting retail banking from investment banking, an idea that is part of a financial sector reform package by the British government. Sir Mervyn's call for an investigation comes after the FSA has already asked the bank to provide it with a full account about what had happened last week. Should the banking regulator determine that any rules were violated, it would hand over the case to its enforcement division that can issue fines. Stephen Hester, RBS chief executive, said this week that the bank would conduct its own review into what went wrong and if the bank's response to the problems could have been better. Risk experts have questioned why it took the bank several days to repair the system, which affected up to 17m customers at the group's RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank brands in the UK and Northern Ireland. It had left private customers and businesses unable to make payments and according to media reports even prompted a defendant in a court case to spend the weekend in prison because his bail money was not being processed. The call for a regulatory probe came as the 82 per cent state-owned banking group said the backlog had been cleared for its NatWest and RBS customers with the exception of a few specific sets of transactions. "It is possible a small number of customers may experience delays as we return to a completely normal service, " the bank said. We will continue to extend our branch opening hours all week. But it added it might need until the start of next week to restore a full service for the 1.9m customers at its Ulster Bank, who were still experiencing "unacceptable delays to their accounts being updated." Sir Mervyn said this was a reminder of what might have happened had the government not rescued RBS in 2008 and of the importance that the people running banks are focused on providing a well-functioning payments system. Additional reporting by Chris Giles