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The UK Parliament’s Treasury committee has asked nine banks and building societies to detail any recent IT failures after a three-day outage at Barclays caused chaos for millions of customers.
A letter to executives asked them to lay out the number of instances that customers were unable to access their services because of IT failures over the past two years, as well as the number of clients affected and how much compensation they had to pay out.
Barclays UK chief executive Vim Maru received a more comprehensive request from the committee about its IT outage at the end of January.
Maru was asked to explain what had caused the failure, which started on January 31 and left customers without essential banking services such as online banking and payments and transfers.
The outage caused distress among Barclays’ more than 20mn UK customers, many of whom were set to receive their first pay cheque of the year while others were trying to meet a deadline to make payments after filing their self-assessment tax returns with HMRC.
“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,” said Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury select committee, on Monday.
“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.”
Barclays at the time acknowledged the technical issues and apologised to customers. It sent an update two days later saying “the technical issue impacting our customers on Friday and Saturday has been resolved and delayed payments processed”.
The UK lender has yet to explain what caused the days-long outage, although people familiar with the bank have said it was not related to a cyber attack or malicious activity.
Barclays has also been asked to provide an initial estimate of compensation it expects to pay out as a result of the outage and whether it expected a rise in fraudulent transactions during and in the immediate aftermath of the IT failure.
The committee also said that the widespread closures of high street bank branches makes technological failings “more painful” for customers.
