Hit by Lloyds, Halifax, TSB and Bank of Scotland glitch? Your rights explained

innovate

To liken yesterday afternoon's LBG group problem with the RBS group meltdown a couple of years back is truly taking the micky.

Of course people who suffered a financial loss caused by LBG need to be re-imbursed but the claimant should provide proof of exactly what the loss is and why it was LBG's fault.

In common with some other posters, I fail to comprehend that people still go out shopping with just one method of payment. Not everyone may want to have 2 liquid current accounts but literally everybody can get a credit card nowadays.

I am very disappointed that MSE towers are beating the compensation drum, and are incredibly light on practical advice on how people can protect themselves from future technology failures (which will no doubt occur). Switching bank accounts isn't the answer, particularly if one of the suggested target accounts is one of the banks affected by yesterday's outage.

aldredd

Oh come on guys - really?
If you were left out of pocket, of course you should be reimbursed.
But compensation for 'Distress' - to the tune of £150? You've got to be kidding me!
This is (IMO) a very different scenario to what happened in 2012 where complete access to accounts along with payments in and out was effectively blocked for several days. Here, we're talking about in-store card payments over a 3 hour period.

Embarrassing? Yes!
Frustrating? Yes!
Emotionally Distressful? No, save for exceptional circumstances (eg where it was an emotional situation anyway, perhaps such as paying for a funeral?)

This site is turning more and more from Money Saving to Money Grabbing every day!

opinions4u

innovate wrote: »

I am very disappointed that MSE towers are beating the compensation drum, and are incredibly light on practical advice on how people can protect themselves from future technology failures (which will no doubt occur). Switching bank accounts isn't the answer, particularly if one of the suggested target accounts is one of the banks affected by yesterday's outage.

But you are in no way surprised.

Money-Saving-King

pete_v wrote: »

"If you're unhappy with your bank's service, then ditch and switch elsewhere.
[...]
There's also a number of switching incentives being offered at present including a £100 bonus for new First Direct* and Halifax Reward* customers"


Switch to Halifax? They're one of the ones that failed...

Pete

But Martin wants people to click his affiliate links!

alanq

There are good reasons why LBG is likely to make ex gratia payments for proven losses due to interruption of service if it doesn't want to lose customers. However, liability depends on negligence. In the case of RBS it was reported that the many days to recover (if not the original issue) were due to human error. A few hours interruption for as yet unknown reasons is different.

If an organisation has taken all reasonable precautions and still the service is interrupted due to say multiple simultaneous unfortunate events then I don't see any negligence and no automatic right to any compensation let alone for distress. Customers should take reasonable precautions to avoid relying on any one system and carry other cards and/or cash in anticipation that from time to time things don't work.

Lloyds Bank Ts&Cs to which its customers have agreed state:
"we will not be liable for losses or costs caused
by abnormal and unforeseeable circumstances
outside our reasonable control, which would
have been unavoidable despite all efforts to the
contrary, for example, delays or failures caused
by industrial action, problems with another
system or network, mechanical breakdown or
data-processing failures;"

I am sure that all banks have similar clauses in their Ts&Cs. We will all pay for any excessive payouts to those affected.

innovate

alanq wrote: »

There are good reasons why LBG is likely to make ex gratia payments for proven losses due to interruption of service if it doesn't want to lose customers.

I reckon that LBG will have no problem to re-imburse people if they experienced a genuine financial loss as a result of the short outage. I also reckon that they will be able to spot compensation scroungers by a country mile, and possibly be glad to see the back of them if they leave on the back of not receiving compensation for this minor incident.

alanq wrote: »

A few hours interruption for as yet unknown reasons is different.

according to Paul Pester, CEO of TSB, the outage was caused by a failing HP server.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/27/lloyds_atm_cash_card_crash/
This begs of course the question why they had no hot standby for this server because it is clearly a mission-critical point in the LBG infrastructure. 2 possible explanations: incompetent IT management who don't understand disaster recovery management, or incompetent Business Executives who cut the IT budget to the bare bones. Probably a combination of both, and Joe Public is unlikely to ever find out the true cause. We don't even know the real cause for the 2012 RBS meltdown, which was massively more severe, and for which we were promised a formal investigation by the FSA. May be that formal investigation has died a quiet death along with the FSA.

Herbalus

I presume the headline is for google search optimisation, but this compensation culture irritates me. And considering MSE doesn't benefit from consumers' desire for compensation, I'm not sure how it received such prominence in the article, especially when it states that compensation is for those out of pocket. I can't envisage many situations where a debit card not working causes people to be out of pocket. Embarrassing, yes, but out of pocket, no.

I'm also disappointed that the article lists 0845 numbers for complaints. Surely they should include at least a mention of saynoto0870.com? But then again, the readership is now so large that publishing local numbers would inevitably have them removed.

opinions4u

Interesting that although LBG ATMs weren't working, LBG customers were able to use non-LBG ATMs for their transactions.

Wonder how many didn't try?

As for Paul Pester at TSB, his efforts on Twitter yesterday were excellent.

JuicyJesus

Interesting that despite MoneySupermarket not having any editorial control, supposedly, MSE still plays to the crowds by playing the "compensation" angle, along with posting that tabloidy "get the most from your bank" article (which I note that they have still not defended or talked about in any way) when if there was no commercial incentive they wouldn't have any reason to put in click-bait.

Hmm...

eskbanker

I may be bucking the trend here but I don't think the article is encouraging compensation claims! It's effectively saying you should be able to claim from LBG if you can demonstrate that they caused you to suffer a quantifiable financial loss, but beyond that you're only likely to be able to have any sort of claim entertained "if you've been put in genuinely distressful circumstances as a result".

To me that's setting the bar pretty high - of course there will be the chancers who will make a song and dance about the embarrassment of checkout declines and so on, but I don't read the piece as encouraging the drama queens!

Given the ethos of the site being about helping the consumer (see http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/site/editorial-code and the 'fighting your corner' banner at the top of the page), it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they should have a piece like this, which doesn't read to me as being particularly provocative.

I do agree with innovate's point about more constructive advice about prevention rather than cure though....