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Barclays and its competitors are under scrutiny from UK lawmakers following a damaging outage at the financial institution that lasted for several days.
The Treasury Select Committee has written to the CEOs of the nine largest banks and building societies in the UK, including Barclays, demanding detailed information on IT failures that have disrupted customer services over the past two years.
The inquiry follows a recent outage at Barclays, which left some customers unable to access key banking services for up to three days, from January 31 to February 2.
The outage coincided with HM Revenue & Customs self-assessment tax deadline and a payday for many workers.
“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,” commented Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Select Committee.
Hillier, a UK member of parliament (MP) sitting with the governing Labour Party, said that “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."
What do MPs want to know?
The letters went to the CMA9, a group of nine banks and building societies designated by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as having significant influence over the country’s retail banking sector.
The MPs are seeking answers on the impact of IT outages and how they have affected customers.
In the letter to Barclays UK CEO Vim Maru, the committee asked for a full breakdown of the outage, including:
- The cause of the failure, a timeline of events and which services were affected, such as online banking, ATMs and card payments.
- How the bank’s board responded to the incident and what steps are being taken to prevent similar failures in the future.
- The estimated number of customers affected, including vulnerable customers.
- Barclays’ approach to handling complaints — whether customers will need to come forward or if the bank will proactively contact those affected.
- An estimate of compensation to be paid and the expected timeline for payouts.
- Changes in customer service response times during and after the outage, as well as measures taken to handle increased inquiries.
- Any increase in fraudulent transactions during the outage and how Barclays is mitigating fraud risks and supporting affected customers.
The committee is also investigating broader IT failures across the banking sector, and the letters sent to the CEOs of the other CMA9 banks, including HSBC and NatWest, asked for information on:
- The number and duration of IT failures each bank has experienced over the past two years, broken down by service type.
- The number of customers affected by each outage.
- The total compensation paid out due to these failures.
- The root causes of these disruptions.
The banks’ responses are due by February 26, and the Treasury Committee has stated that they will be published in full.
