Banks pay customers millions after month’s worth of IT outages | Global News Avenue

A group of MPs showed that nine major banks and construction societies operating in the UK had accumulated at least 803 hours of technical disruption over the past two years, equivalent to 33 days.

The Finance Committee has been investigating the impact of banking, forcing Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, National, Santander, Natvester, Dansk Bank, Bank of Ireland and Bank of Ireland to provide data.

It does not include Barclays in January or Lloyd’s power outage last week – Two incidents occurring on paydays by many people, preventing customers from paying their employees and bills.

Barclays can now face a pay payment of £12.5 million, the report found.

“For family and personal life check checks, losing access to bank services on payday can be a terrible experience,” said Dame Meg Hillier, chairman of the committee.

“In the past two years, there have been enough power outages to fill the entire month, which shows that the frustration of customers is completely effective,” she added.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4, she said she hopes that putting data in the public domain would encourage banks and regulators to see if anything else can be taken to reduce interference.

“This again emphasizes that traditional banking is not keeping up with the investments needed to modernize infrastructure,” said Patrick Burgess of Chartered Institute BCS.

The Finance Committee’s data examined its failures that affected millions of customers between January 2023 and February this year. They found 158 incidents.

Although the data does not include Barclays in January This makes a family without a homethe bank did confirm to the committee that over three days, more than half of online payments were invalid due to “severe degradation” of its system performance.

The bank confirmed to the committee that it expects to pay £5 million to £7.5 million to customers for “inconvenience or distress”.

Considering all the information shared by Barclays, this means banks can pay up to £12.5 million in compensation due to interruptions in the past two years.

The second highest amount paid by a company during the same period was £350,000 from the Bank of Ireland.

The compensation paid by other banks is:

• AIB (£590)
• HSBC (£232,697)
• Lloyds (£160,000)
• National (£77,452)
• NATWEST (£348,000)
• Santander (£17,000)

Barclays UK CEO Vim Maru said in his presentation to the committee that the power outage in January was caused by software issues in its system and that the incident was not due to a cyber attack “or any other malicious activity”.

“We continue to work on impacts to ensure that the incident causes no customer or client to pay for it.”

Barclays told BBC News that it “is very regretful for customers affected by any service disruption”.