Outages across four major UK banks’ online systems last week may catch the attention of British MPs, who were already probing the sector’s widely publicised IT issues.
In a development which was not UK consumers’ first rodeo with the banking sector, outages were felt across Lloyds Bank, Halifax, TSB and Bank of Scotland apps.
Countless banking users reported outages via the online platform Downdector. For many, the timing of the outages was particularly unfortunate due to coinciding with the UK payday.
The last day of the month is also a date when many people schedule bill and subscription payments. As with previous outages, many took to social media to voice their frustrations.
The outages come in the context of increasing pressure on the banking sector, both in the UK and further afield in the EU and US, to ensure better IT and cybersecurity resilience.
Just a few weeks before the outages, the Treasury Committee – a cross-party group of backbench UK MPs tasked with scrutinising British financial policies – recently wrote a letter to the leadership of several major banks.
This letter was penned following a three day outage at Barclays starting 31 January. The CEO of Barclays, alongside leadership of Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, Danske, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander, were contacted.
Meanwhile, the EU has applied the final deadline of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which places strict standards around IT risk management, resilience testing and incident reporting across 20,000 financial organisations.
“In many ways, DORA is a step by regulators to address the vulnerabilities exposed by the rapid innovation of fintech,” Marios Joannou, Head of Digital Risk and Privacy at payabl., a London-based paytech firm, told Payment Expert the day of DORA’s compliance deadline.
Across the Atlantic, US regulators are also paying attention to cybersecurity, with the SEC recently recognising its main unit tasked with overseeing cyber and crypto activity. This will probably not be regulators’ main priority in the US right now, however, as they face the chainsaw of Elon Musk’s DOGE and its cost cutting campaign.
Following the latest series of IT outages, British MPs may renew pressure on banks to ensure disruption to the payments sector is not disrupted by these occurrences. The fact the government is placing a heavy emphasis on UK financial services as part of its ambitious plan for growth may further amplify this pressure.
