9 main banks and constructing societies working within the UK amassed a minimum of 803 hours – the equal of 33 days – of tech outages prior 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 offer 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 workers and payments.
The report finds Barclays may now face compensation funds of £12.5m.
“For households and people residing pay examine to pay examine, shedding entry to banking providers on payday could be a terrifying expertise,” mentioned Dame Meg Hillier, the committee’s chair.
“The actual fact there was sufficient outages to fill a complete month throughout the final two years exhibits prospects’ frustrations are fully legitimate,” she added.
Barclays informed RAYNAE 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 providers out there 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 RAYNAE 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 could possibly be carried out to cut back the disruption.
The Treasury Committee knowledge checked out IT failures which affected tens of millions 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 with out a house, the financial institution did affirm to the committee that over half of on-line funds over the course of three days didn’t work because 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 taking into consideration the entire info shared by Barclays, this implies the financial institution may pay out as much as £12.5m in compensation because of outages during the last 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.
