LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Treasury Select Committee has asked nine big banks and and building societies for details of recent systems failings, including the impact on customers, following outages at Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group earlier this month.
The cross-party group of lawmakers asked banks on Monday for the number of instances and the amount of time in hours each of them had suffered IT failures which prevented customers from using their services.
In the letter to Barclays, the Committee asked about the outage which began on Friday 31 January, including how customer service teams responded to distressed consumers and what action the bank’s board took to rectify the issue.
The bank on February 3 said a technical issue had impacted customers, delaying payments, without going into details about the reasons.
Such outages can prevent bank customers from paying vital bills or buying food they need, said lawmaker Meg Hillier, Chair of the Committee.
“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,” she said.
“Either way, it’s important to learn what has happened and what will be done about it.”
(Reporting By Lawrence White; Editing by Tommy Reggiori wilkes)
