NS&I Big Data and the WOPR Problem?

Adapting to the new world is far from straight-forward and NS&I are yet another publicly humiliated organisation that has failed to migrate data to a new system, costing billions. These sorts of problems are common and normally don’t come to light in the private sector, unless there has been a GDPR data breach.

Getting your money into someone’s system is easy, getting it out often isn’t as simple as it could be. That’s why when we review who we use to hold your investments we consider what is required. Customer service is something that is overlooked when assessing solutions, yet can become a significant barrier.

In order to provide “better” (cheaper) services to their millions (250m) of customers, NS&I undertook a £2bn Business Transformation Programme in 2020 to modernise their systems. Two years into the project red flags were all over the place, signalling that it would be unachievable, so in 2024 they rebooted the project and over £1.3bn more has been required. It certainly seems that the project is still unlikely to be delivered before 2028 and the Committee of Public Accounts have, I think it fair to conclude, torn the management team of NS&I to shreds, noting weak controls, poor and delayed decisions and frankly a naïve lack of understanding of the complexity of the issues. They are still not of the view that NS&I really are up to the task or owning the scale of the problem.

Most of us have a soft spot for the old Post Office, trusted by many families for generations. Sadly, sentiments are not the way to assess service, which is shaped by experience.  Unfortunately, my experience of NS&I isn’t terribly good. Not too long ago they offered advisers the opportunity to digitally connect with client accounts, we have had minimal success with this, but honestly, it’s been something of a nightmare, with links and passwords not working. Registration processes have been awful.

You probably have seen in the news in late March that NS&I have made so many blunders that they are now in the position of having to pay significant compensation to savers whose accounts seem to be either inaccurate or missing.  At the time of writing, there is nothing on NS&I’s website that even mentions the debacle.

Remember that NS&I are basically a front for HM Treasury to raise funds from the public safely; using the money to fund capital projects in the country. Essentially, you are lending your money to the Government.

If you have NS&I products, Premium Bonds, Savings Certificates, Cash ISA etc, please get in touch and we will attempt to include these in our reports to you and will hopefully provide you with additional support should you experience problems with them.

Here is a reminder of the dramatic warning about data security that many of us received over four decades ago in 1983 when a student (Matthew Broderick) hacked the NORAD defence system WOPR (War Operational Plan Response) in the film War Games. The issue isn’t really the technology, but the lack of good human thinking.

(War Games (1983), Directed by John Badham, Starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and John Wood Produced by United Artists)

Let us know about your NS&I Accounts.

References:

Public Accounts Report Feb 2026: https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/51662/documents/286154/default/

NS&I Transformation Programme: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9280/nsis-transformation-programme/

NS&I Board: https://nsandi-corporate.com/governance/who-we-are

NS&I Prize Checker: https://www.nsandi.com/prize-checker

War Games (1983): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

What we do: https://www.solomonsifa.co.uk/what-we-do/