Treasury Committee asks for bank IT outage info

The Treasury Committee has written to 9 banks and building societies asking them to provide information on IT outages in the past 2 years and how these have affected current accounts. The request follows the recent Barclays outage. The letter asks firms for:

• the number of instances and amount of hours each provider suffered IT failures that meant customers could not use their services;
• how many customers have been affected and how much firms have paid in compensation; and
• the reason for each outage.

The Barclays letter asks additional questions about the recent outage, including on how customer service teams responded to distressed consumers and what action the Board took to put things right.

The letters ask for responses by 26 February.