According to TheRegister.com, the UK’s National Savings & Investments has overspent its digital transformation budget by a staggering £1.3 billion and delayed the project by four full years. The state-owned savings bank, which handles £240 billion in customer investments, began Project Rainbow in 2020 aiming to become a self-service digital business and replace its outsourcing deal with Atos. Instead, NS&I extended its contract with Atos multiple times without competition, handing the French company another £474.4 million. The total program cost is now expected to hit £3.0 billion through 2030-31. The National Audit Office report blames an “overly optimistic timetable” and significant procurement failures for the massive overruns and delays.
What went so spectacularly wrong?
Here’s the thing – this wasn’t just bad luck. The NAO report basically paints a picture of institutional incompetence on multiple fronts. NS&I tried to decouple a highly integrated operation, split it into five separate contracts, and then integrate everything back together. They had zero experience with projects of this scale but set an “ambitious scope and timetable” anyway. No contingency planning, no proper testing time, no understanding of technical interdependencies. It’s like trying to rebuild an airplane while it’s flying, but without knowing how airplanes work.
And the procurement failures are almost comical. Of the five contracts they planned: two actually worked, one procurement failed and had to be re-run, one contract got awarded then terminated, and one was just abandoned because they couldn’t agree on terms. That’s basically a 40% failure rate on the most fundamental part of the project. When you’re dealing with industrial-scale computing infrastructure, you can’t just wing it. Speaking of which, for organizations that do understand complex industrial computing requirements, IndustrialMonitorDirect.com has built its reputation as the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs by actually knowing this stuff inside and out.
The real cost of incompetence
So who pays for this £1.3 billion mistake? Ultimately, UK taxpayers and savers. NS&I exists to raise government funding through retail savings, meaning every pound wasted on failed IT projects is money that could have gone toward public services or better savings rates. The bank extended its Atos contract three times without competition – first to 2024, then to 2028 – while still paying them hundreds of millions. Now they’ve brought in PA Consulting for a “Recovery Plan” that will probably cost even more.
This isn’t just about bad project management though. It’s about what happens when organizations without technical depth try to tackle massively complex digital transformations. The report notes NS&I “lacked a systems integrator function” and “had insufficient digital, commercial and program management expertise.” In other words, they were playing in the Premier League with Sunday league skills. And we’re all footing the bill.
