9 main banks and constructing societies working within the UK gathered a minimum of 803 hours – the equal of 33 days – of tech issues prior to now two years, figures printed by a gaggle of MPs present.
The Treasury Committee – which has been investigating the affect of banking outages – 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 workers and payments.
The report finds Barclays may now face compensation funds of £12.5m.
Chair of the Treasury Choose Committee, Dame Meg Hillier MP, mentioned: “For households and people dwelling pay test to pay test, shedding entry to banking companies on payday generally is a terrifying expertise.”
The Treasury Committee knowledge checked out IT failures which affected tens of millions of shoppers between January, 2023 and February this 12 months. They discovered there had been 158 incidents.
Whereas the information doesn’t embody the Barclays outage in January, which left one household with no 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 bearing in mind the entire info shared by Barclays, this implies the financial institution may 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.