The Chief Executive of Ulster Bank has said that he will not take a bonus payment this year.

In a statement, Jim Brown said that he was personally committed to re-earning the trust of customers and that he had informed the Ulster Bank board that he does not wish to be considered for an annual bonus for 2012.

Earlier, representatives of Ulster Bank appeared before the finance committee as the bank's technology problems continue to disrupt services to customers.

Management have been discussing the payments backlog following a technical breakdown two weeks ago.

Mr Brown told the committee that the bank unreservedly apologised to its customers and customers of other banks.

Mr Brown said it was "unacceptable".

He confirmed no customer would be left out of pocket and employees were working flat out to resume a normal service.

He said the problems had been "unprecedented in terms of the complexity and challenges restoring service."

Next week, commencing 9 July, would be the last week of significant delays for Ulster Bank customers and by week starting 16 July, normal services would have resumed for most, Mr Brown added.

He said its parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland, would carry out a detailed examination of what went wrong and publish it once the restoration and recovery phase was over.

Since the crisis began, the bank had provided an additional 1,659 hours of branch opening time including Saturdays and Sundays in the Republic, Mr Brown explained.

167,000 customers were spoken to directly in the branch network.

Call centre staff and capacity had been increased by 300%, and there were 1.3 million visits to the website, a 90% increase on business as normal volumes.

Communications to the public on when problems would be resolved, had been made in good faith, Mr Brown said.

He was responding to questions from committee chairman Alex White as to why people should accept the latest assurances from Ulster Bank about when problems would finally be concluded.

Mr Brown said it was fair to say that as the bank got into resolving the issues, the issues were more complex than initially thought.

He said significant inroads had been made in processing the backlog of delayed transactions and that had given the bank more confidence that things would be resolved on schedule.

Earlier, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said it was not acceptable in this day and age for people to be put through the fears and anxieties caused by the Ulster Bank crisis.

Customers will be compensated

A senior executive at RBS said that Ulster Bank customers affected by recent technology problems will be compensated.

Chief Executive of RBS's Corporate Banking Division Chris Sullivan said it was now believed that problems would be resolved for most customers by the week starting 16 July.

However, he told RTÉ's Morning Ireland that this was an informed estimate rather than a certainty.

Customers are continuing to experience difficulties as payments fail to reach their accounts.

Mr Sullivan said the system breakdown could only be addressed at Ulster Bank once issues had been resolved at RBS and NatWest first.

"Because of that Ulster Bank went past a single day, and then various days became involved in the overall process which caused a corruption of data.

"All of that data had to be manually corrected, and as this was happening, and it took a number of days, transactions were just building up," he added.

Thousands of customers in Northern Ireland are still affected by the computer failure at RBS.

Members of the bank's management team also appeared before Stormont's Enterprise, Trade and Investment Committee this morning.