The Treasury Committee has written to CEOs at nine
banks and building societies to request information on the
scale and impact of IT failures which have affected their
businesses over the last two years.
The letters follow the recent outage at Barclays which led to
some customers being unable to access certain services for up to
three days from Friday 31 January - the HMRC self-assessment
deadline and a common time for wages to be paid into personal
accounts.
The Bank of England has previously outlined their view that,
while one-off outages at a single firm are not necessarily a risk
to the UK's financial stability, IT failures which affect a
systemically important firm or multiple organisations at the same
time could be.
MPs are asking firms for the number of instances and amount of
time in hours each current account provider has suffered IT
failures which prevented customers using their services.
The Committee is also seeking to collect data on the number of
customers who have been affected and how much each firm has paid
out in compensation to those affected. The reason for each outage
has also been requested.
In the letter to Barclays, the Committee asks more detailed
questions about the outage which began on Friday 31 January.
These include how customer service teams responded to distressed
consumers and what action the Board took to rectify the
issue.
Bosses at Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, Danske,
HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest
Group and Santander have been asked to respond by Wednesday 26
February.
Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Dame MP, said:
“When a bank's IT system goes down, it can be a real problem for
our constituents who were relying on accessing certain services
so they can buy food or pay bills.
“For it to happen at a major bank such as Barclays at such a
crucial time of year is either bad luck or bad planning. Either
way, it's important to learn what has happened and what will be
done about it.
"The rapidly declining number of high street bank branches makes
the impact of IT outages even more painful; that's why I've
decided to write to some of our biggest banks and building
societies."
