The systems failure at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) which left millions of customers unable to access their accounts, has found its culprit in a junior technician in India, who accidentally erased information during a routine software upgrade.

The “inexperienced operative”, who was working on the programme for the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank, is believed to have been based in Hyderabad, India.

The technology website, The Register, has said that at least part of the team responsible for the error were recruited in India following redundancies in the department in the UK.

Union have already begun blaming the fiasco as an outcome of outsourcing IT jobs, as Indian staff are paid as little as £9,000, compared with £50,000 their British counterparts were paid.

Stephen Hester, chief executive of RBS, said that there was “no evidence” that outsourcing had caused the problems. “The IT centre in Edinburgh is our main centre, it is nothing to do with overseas. Things go wrong. Things go wrong in technology. We have to learn the lessons from what went wrong here and try to make then less likely to happen in the future”, he said.

Hester has also admitted that the bonuses of senior executives at RBS are likely to be cut because of the incident. The error is understood to have occurred after a software update froze part of the banks’ computer systems last Wednesday, affecting 17 million customers.

Although the problem was resolved on Friday, it created a backlog of more than 100 million transactions that were not paid in or out of bank accounts as they should have been. Deleted information then had to be painstakingly re-entered into the bank group’s computer system.

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