NS&I CEO Dax Harkins has resigned today after a wave of complaints about how the savings body treated the families of deceased customers.
Finance minister Torsten Bell MP told the Commons today that Sir Jim Harra, HMRC First Permanent Secretary, would take over as interim CEO from today. He thanked Dax Harkins for his years of service.
NS&I has been hit with a string of complaints from the families of deceased customers about long and frustrating delays related to returning funds to beneficiaries.
The Daily Telegraph has reported on numerous complaints with some families waiting months or years for the return of money.
Mr Bell said an initial review by NS&I of 34m customer records suggests up to £470m in deposits held by 37,500 customers could be affected.
He accepted this number was “too many” but said it represented less than 0.2% of NS&I's customers.
He said NS&I, which holds a total of £240bn in customer savings, was apologising for the errors in tracing customers’ funds.
The priority now for NS&I, he said, would be to find the causes of the tracing issues and to reunite beneficiaries of late customers with any funds that NS&I holds. He said additional staff would be deployed to sort out the problems and funds were 100% safe. Appropriate compensation will be paid where eligible.
Mr Bell said that David Goldstone, who is the chair of the Office for Value for money, has been asked to help the bank bring its transformation programme back on track. Sir Jim will launch a review over the next three months.
Mr Harkins was appointed NS&I chief executive in April 2023, having been acting chief executive from March 2023. He was responsible for the development and delivery of NS&I’s business-to-business strategy and NS&I’s operational performance. He has three decades experience in sales, marketing, product development and customer management.
He joined NS&I in 2003 and his salary for 2024/25 was in the range of £185,000 - £190,000.
In a statement today, NS&I said: "NS&I has identified an issue where the estates of deceased customers were not always repaid money from all of their accounts following a bereavement claim.
"These errors happened because the search process used when handling a bereavement claim failed to identify all NS&I products. The issue has been resolved for current and new bereavement claims and robust measures have been introduced to ensure this does not happen again.
"NS&I apologises and is extremely sorry for these errors. It is working hard to ensure everybody affected is paid what is owed to them. Families, beneficiaries and deceased customers' estates do not need to take any immediate action. NS&I will contact estates that are affected and will publish further information for the beneficiaries of those estates in due course.
"NS&I estimate that up to 37,500 bereavement claims with a total value of up to £476 million in customer deposits may have been affected. Notwithstanding this issue, in 2025, NS&I received 211,800 new bereavement claims and repaid £4 billion. This equates to in the region of two million bereavement claims over the last ten years. NS&I will ensure customers' estates are appropriately compensated. More details will be published in May."