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- Global banking market capitalisation slumps by over 30% amid pandemic says Buyshares research
- S&P Global report says financial market infrastructure sector's earnings likely to cool off In second half
- CMA issues fifth publication over 3 years of the service quality league table of personal and business current account providers
- Barclays says scammers take advantage of COVID-19, cashing in on nations’ uncertainty
- Juniper Research new study says the volume of B2B payments facilitated by non-banks will exceed 53 billion in 2022, from a COVID-related low of 38 billion in 2020
- Digital wallet spend in Europe & North America to increase by 40% in 2019, finds study
- Juniper forecasts mobile money transactions will exceed 200 billion by 2024
- Banks can save the world from climate change, says former UN climate chief
- Research by NatWest reveals gender divide over attitudes to saving
- Europe’s big bank problem: too much capital is trapped in the US, says Scope
- Later-Life lending market set to almost double in the next 10 years, finds report
- Barclays/Cebr report challenges nation to think differently about wealth
- Fifth of UK investors looking to debt investment, new research reveals
- Regtech will play a more important role in PSD2, says Mitek
- Banks turn to Fintech partnerships to improve customer experience, finds Fraedom
- New industry code to tackle fraud must deliver, says Which?
- New TTF report highlights loss of trust in financial services
- Arxan highlights financial app vulnerability epidemic
- SAS asks whether banks really need to choose between operations and innovation
- Which? raises alarm as almost 1,700 free ATMs become fee-charging
- Financial wellness affects half of peoples’ mental or physical health, finds report
- Study finds traditional financial institutions embrace Fintech disruption
- Grass is greener for environmentally friendly businesses, finds Barclays
- Prospective homeowners would consider a 40-year mortgage to escape renting, finds Santander
- Millennials’ needs are changing the face of banking industry, says new report
- FS is putting consumer data at risk by failing to protect mobile apps, says Arxan
- A lack of belief in their ability holds 28% women back in work, says Cambridge & Counties
- ‘Which?’ reveals Scotland has lost over a third of its bank branches in eight years
- Next downturn unlikely to be as bad as 2008, according to S&P
- FCA reveals findings from first cryptoassets consumer research
- US consumers favour single mobile app for banking and payments
- Banks suffering major IT shutdowns every day, ‘Which?’ reveals
- The US will be a key offshore centre in 2019, says GlobalData
- Debit industry changes markedly in 10 years of the Debit Issuer Study
- UK's ‘Big Five’ face ‘too big to compete’ as small challengers secure stellar returns
- Banks as vulnerable now as before crash, says new study
- Leverage ratio a constant conundrum for European and US banks, says SNL
5th March 2019
Banks suffering major IT shutdowns every day, ‘Which?’ reveals
British banks are being hit by more than one major IT or security failure that stops customers from making payments every day, a ‘Which?’ Money investigation has found. In the most comprehensive analysis carried out since banks started disclosing serious IT glitches last year ‘Which?’found there were 302 incidents that prevented customers from making payments in the last nine months of 2018.
The stark findings reveal that serious banking crashes are even more common than previously thought and highlight the need for the government to step in and give a single regulator the statutory duty to protect access to cash and build a sustainable cash infrastructure for the UK – a vital backup while digital banking is so vulnerable to failure.
The research also comes as the independent ‘access to cash’ review chaired by Natalie Ceeney is due to report imminently on consumer requirements for cash over the next five to 15 years. The interim report warned that failing to plan for a no-cash society “would do significant harm to the millions of people who would be left behind”.
Since April last year, the Financial Conduct Authority has required banks to inform them of any major operational or security incident that prevents customers from using payment services. ‘Which?’ found the average number of major breaches across each of the 30 banks and building societies in its analysis was one a month – with six of the major banks suffering at least one every two weeks.
Barclays reported most major incidents (41), at more than one every week in the last nine months of 2018. It was followed by Lloyds Bank (37), Halifax/Bank of Scotland (31), NatWest (26), Royal Bank of Scotland (21) and Ulster Bank (18). TSB, where the botched introduction of a new IT system last year caused 1.9 million people to lose access to online banking services, reported 16 incidents.
The latest findings by ‘Which?’, along with incidents like last year’s Europe-wide Visa payments outage, suggest that Britain’s financial system has a long way to go before it will be resilient enough to support a no-cash society.
‘Which’ is concerned that more than 25 million people who consider access to cash a necessity risk being left vulnerable without a non-digital payment alternative as bank branches and cashpoints across the UK disappear at an alarming rate. Previous ‘Which?’ research has shown that ATMs vanished at a rate of 488 per month in the second half of last year, while more than 3,300 bank branches have closed since 2015.
Jenny Ross, Which? Money Editor, 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. This highlights why it is so important that a regulator is given responsibility to protect cash as a backup when technology fails and to ensure no-one is left behind as digital payments become more common.”
