Tesco Bank is delaying the introduction of its current account service until next year.

It had been planning to launch in 2012 as it geared up to take on Lloyds, Barclays, RBS, HSBC and Santander, who together control the vast majority of UK current accounts. But it now says it will wait until a new switching service arrives in September 2013. This is being set up by the Payments Council under recommendation from the Independent Commission on Banking. The aim is to reduce the amount of time it takes to switch an account from around 18 days to seven working days, provide an account switching guarantee that customers can rely on and automatically switch incoming payments to the new account.

It's not the first speed bump encountered by the retail giant's FS arm. In October last year, Tesco announced its decision to slow the final stage of the Tesco Bank systems migration. The retailer was looking to avoid a repeat of when customers were locked out of their online accounts during the switch to a new banking platform from Fiserv. As a result, the introduction of mortgages and current accounts to the new platform was delayed until early 2012.

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