Bear in mind that the ultimate root cause of this mess wasn't "capitalist overdrive" but an ill-thought-out intervention by the EU forcing Lloyds TSB to split up because they thought there wasn't enough competition in British banking, without properly considering the practical implications of their systems having become completely integrated over the two decades that they were one company. To put this in some context, the article meantions problems with internet banking - that didn't exist yet when the two were last independent companies. The first, very broken, version of SSL had only been released a few months before their merger.