Ranked: The high street banks with the most IT outages
UK banks are suffering IT outages or security failures at a rate of more than one a day, new figures from the financial watchdog have revealed.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) now requires banks to publish information on IT failures.
Read more: Barclays down: Banking app outage hits customers
Analysis conducted by Which found there were 302 incidents affecting payments systems in the final nine months of 2018.
Barclays reported the most ‘operational or security incidents’ with 41 over the period, with 15 of those affecting internet banking, followed by Lloyds Bank with 37 and Halifax / Bank of Scotland with 31.
Bank | Number of incidents |
Barclays | 41 |
Lloyds | 37 |
Bank of Scotland/Halifax | 31 |
Natwest | 26 |
RBS | 21 |
Ulster | 18 |
TSB | 16 |
The data does not show how long the failures lasted for or how many customers were affected.
Despite the figures, Barclays came second in a Competition and Market Authority survey of how satisfied customers were with online and mobile banking services.
A Barclays spokesperson said: "We take IT resilience extremely seriously and we welcome transparency for our customers which is why we report every incident to the regulator, even minor glitches that have minimal impact on customers."
"Our systems are designed to ensure continuity of service for customers in the event of an incident, with a range of channels available to customers including our branch network, telephone, online and mobile banking.”
TSB, which was hit by an outage lasting several weeks preventing 1.9m customers from accessing their accounts, reported 16 incidents – the seventh highest.
Which Money editor Jenny Ross said: “Our research shows that these major banking glitches, which can cause huge stress and inconvenience to those affected, are even more common than we feared.”
Read more: Lloyds Bank suffers IT outage
Starling and Virgin both recorded no incidents over the nine months, according to data shared by the bank with the FCA, while Monzo, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank reported one glitches.
Bank | Number of incidents |
Monzo | 1 |
Clydesdale | 1 |
Yorkshire Bank | 1 |
Starling | 0 |
Virgin | 0 |