9 main banks and constructing societies working within the UK accrued no less than 803 hours – the equal of 33 days – of tech outages up to now two years, figures printed by a bunch of MPs present.
The Treasury Committee – which has been investigating the influence of banking IT failures – compelled Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Financial institution, Financial institution of Eire and Allied Irish Financial institution to supply the information.
It doesn’t embody the Barclays outage in January or the Lloyds outage final week – two incidents which occurred on pay day for many individuals, and left prospects unable to pay their employees and payments.
The report finds Barclays might now face compensation funds of £12.5m.
“For households and people residing pay verify to pay verify, dropping entry to banking companies on payday could be a terrifying expertise,” mentioned Dame Meg Hillier, the committee’s chair.
“The very fact there was sufficient outages to fill an entire month throughout the final two years exhibits prospects’ frustrations are utterly legitimate,” she added.
Barclays advised BBC Information it “welcomed the chance” to interact with the Westminster committee.
“Supporting and serving our prospects stays our primary precedence. We proceed to work arduous to maintain all our companies accessible and we’re deeply sorry to prospects who’ve been impacted by any service outage,” added a spokesperson.
Talking on the Right now programme, on BBC Radio 4, she mentioned she hoped placing the information within the public area would encourage banks and the regulator to see if there was any extra that may very well be executed to scale back the disruption.
The Treasury Committee information checked out IT failures which affected hundreds of thousands of shoppers between January, 2023 and February this yr. They discovered there had been 158 incidents.
Whereas the information doesn’t embody the Barclays outage in January, which left one household and not using a residence, the financial institution did verify to the committee that over half of on-line funds over the course of three days didn’t work as a result of “extreme degradation” of their system’s efficiency.
The financial institution confirmed to the committee that it expects to pay between £5m and £7.5m in compensation to prospects for “inconvenience or misery”.
When considering the entire data shared by Barclays, this implies the financial institution might pay out as much as £12.5m in compensation as a result of outages over the past two years.
The second highest quantity paid out by a agency in that very same interval is £350,000 from the Financial institution of Eire.
