News

UK bank regulators to investigate IT outages

April 1, 2014

British financial regulators have announced their intention to investigate the IT systems of U.K. FIs. This follows a number of high profile outages that have left accountholders unable to use payment cards at ATM and POS terminals or complete banking transactions online.

A report by Out-Law.com said that the Financial Conduct Authority, the Bank of England and the Prudential Regulatory Authority will cooperatively investigate and report on progress banks have made to modernize and secure their banking infrastructure.

In its business plan the FCA said that the regulators' review will assess "how far individual firms have progressed" since it wrote to the financial institutions in 2012 and asked the companies to detail the action they were taking "to ensure the overall resilience of critical infrastructure and banking processes."

In January, Sam Woods, director of domestic UK banks at the PRA, told a parliamentary committee that major IT outages that had occurred recently at major FIs were "completely unacceptable."

However he also acknowledged that "antiquated" IT systems would take some time to fix. "I feel we are a very long away from being able to sit here with confidence and say that the UK banks' IT systems are robust," he said.