Treasury calls up banking executives after IT failures

IT outages were ‘either bad luck or bad planning’

UK high street banks are under scrutiny after a series of recent IT failures.

UK banks and building societies are being asked to detail their recent IT failures in front of the Treasury Committee, following outages at Barclays, Lloyds and Halifax last week.

Executives have been asked to describe the number of times IT failures have caused customers to lose access to services over the last two years.

They have also had to list the number of clients affected and how much compensation each bank has had to pay out.

Special attention has been paid to Barclays’ outage at the end of January, which affected many people’s pay cheques and bill payments.

Unlike the Lloyds and Halifax failure, which was cleared up in less than 24 hours, the Barclays glitch lasted for three days, including a weekend.

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury select committee, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying: “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.”

All three banks are yet to explain what caused their respective IT issues, though it is likely that the issue was the same at both Halifax and parent company Lloyds.

People familiar with Barclays have said the company’s outage was not related to a cyber attack or malicious activity.