Never let it be said that we don’t celebrate good news!
Since April 2018, UK banks have had to report “Operational and Security Incidents” affecting personal and business current accounts to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) if they reach any of the following thresholds:
- 10% of transaction affected;
- 5000 payment service users affected; and/or
- 2 hours service downtime.
The latest figures on the FCA website relate to the period October 2020 to September 2021, and we compare these to the figures for July 2019 to June 2020. Amongst the big banks/banking groups, the picture is not very clear, for instance:
- Santander was up from 12 incidents to 14;
- Bank of Scotland was up from 8 incidents to 15;
- Barclays was up from 2 incidents to 6; but
- Virgin Money was down from 11 incidents to 4.
However, amongst the smaller banks and building societies (including Bank of Ireland, Nationwide, Starling, Tesco and TSB) there appears to be some good news – the total number of operational incidents across these firms is down from 47 to 33! In terms of types of incident, the pattern is similar to the previous period too, although disruptions to phone banking have increased amongst this group.