MPs demand action over rise in online bank crashes

eskbanker

Flobberchops wrote: »

I'm going to take a contrarian position here and say that I agree. IT infrastructure is an area where the main banks can, and should, be doing much better. Let me put it this way: if airports used the outdated, creaking IT systems banks do, planes would be crashing into the ground or colliding midair on a daily basis. If hospitals used the same systems, people would be dying in droves. But in the case of banking... cheer up, it's "only" people's life savings and daily living costs at stake.

I'm not convinced that the analogies really work, as so much depends on the reliance on technology and the availability of manual/offline alternatives.

There have been numerous examples of air traffic control systems problems, and when they happen the industry standard is to prevent flights from taking off and use manual fallback methods for those already in the air. The Boeing 737 Max fiasco is an example of aviation technology that was inadequately specified/designed/tested, with fatal consequences for several hundred people.

In healthcare, there was an estimate last year of up to 900 deaths annually being attributable to NHS software, while outages such as this one caused chaos. Again, when there are big system issues, some activity continues but other non-essential stuff is postponed.

I'm not in any way suggesting that the technology underpinning banking can't (or even shouldn't) be improved, but it'll be a complex cost/benefit analysis that makes it extremely difficult to justify the disproportionate cost of squeezing the last few fractions of a percentage to go from, say, 99.8% uptime to 99.9% or whatever.

Not sure it's helpful to say that people's life savings are at stake though, as (like the other industries) manual fallback options will generally be available when there are online problems. Obviously last year's TSB debacle was a particularly high-profile and high-impact issue but to the best of my recollection most other incidents were relatively short-term blips. Of course these cause inconvenience but the key question really is how much people would be prepared to pay for better reliability - there's obviously the familiar simplistic refrain that banks are loaded and profitable and therefore a kneejerk expectation that they should put their hands in their pockets, but as a bank employee would you be happy if your employer committed more spend to technology if your remuneration was affected? Or as a customer would you be prepared to pay a fee for a higher standard of online (or other) service?

However, the widely-varying level of incidents does clearly suggest that differing approaches to technology are available across the industry, whether that's infrastructure or software or governance or whatever - in the most recently published 12 month period it's notable that, say, HSBC reported 4 incidents affecting online banking, while Barclays reported 21. I'm not aware of more detailed data being published to support these numbers though, so the root causes aren't visible....