UK lawmakers demand details of banks’ IT glitches

The Treasury Select Committee has asked the CEOs of the UKʼs nine biggest banks to provide details on the “scale and impact” of any IT failures at their institutions in the past two years.

The demand follows an outage at Barclays last month, which left customers unable to access their accounts. The January 31 failure coincided with the self-assessment tax payment deadline, and also left some of the affected Barclays customers unable to access salary payments.

“When a bank’s IT system goes down, it can be a real problem for our constituents, who [rely] on accessing certain services so they can buy food or pay bills,” said Treasury committee chair Meg Hillier. “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.”

As well as the head of Barclays, the committee has written to the bosses of HSBC, Santander, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide, Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland and Danske Bank requesting information on the number and duration of outages in their UK services. It wants the data split out for ATMs, cards, banking apps, in-branch and website transactions, as well as the total number of customers affected by each separate outage.

Hillier has also asked for an explanation for each failure, and details of any compensation paid to customers.

Similar outages have occurred before, such as a 2018 failure by TSB when migrating its IT systems left a “significant number” of its 5.2 million customers unable to access their accounts.

The bank ultimately paid out £32.7 million in redress to those affected, and was fined an additional £48.7 million by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in December 2022. TSB’s then chief information officer, Carlos Abarca, was also personally fined £81,620 for failing to take reasonable steps to ensure the bank “adequately managed and supervised appropriately its outsourcing arrangements” around the migration.

Prior to that in 2014, the PRA and FCA jointly fined Royal Bank of Scotland £56 million for a 2012 IT disruption that affected around 6.5 million customers.

The Treasury Committee has asked for a response to its query by February 26.