RBS has just stepped into another IT nightmare. The company, which owns the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Coutts and Ulster Bank, has admitted that 600,000 customer transactions weren't completed last night. It hasn't revealed the exact nature of the problem, referring to it only as "an issue with our overnight process." The electronic mishap means a large number of customers haven't had direct debits and credit applied to their accounts -- the sort of transactions that people normally use to make important payments, like household bills. The banking group says sorting its customer's balances is now a top priority and that delayed payments will be processed "no later than Saturday." That's quite a wait, although the larger question is how such a technology-centric failure was allowed to occur in the first place. Shouldn't there be fail-safes for these sorts of situations?