Treasury committee demanding answers on IT outages

friolento

Hoenir said:

Yorkshire_Pud said:

Why is Barclays so bureaucratic in its systems and procedures at the expense of concentrating resources on efficiency fit for banking in the 21st Century?

Remember this is a Government that thinks building 1.5 million homes a year is an achievable aim. 

In addition to @eskbanker’s response: A Parliamentary Select Committee is not a Government body. It’s a cross-party group of MPs who check and report on areas ranging from the work of government departments to economic affairs. You can find information about the Treasury Committee on  https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/158/treasury-committee/

Ballard

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Banks will probably be asking whether they are responsible to the PRA/FCA, or to a Parliamentary Select Committee. If the latter are unhappy with the PRA/FCA, perhaps they should be taking it up with them, rather than attempting to bypass them?

That aside, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Select Committee are aware that the recent Barclays outage also affected numerous indirect Barclays customers, such as those of us whose withdrawals from Gatehouse Bank were delayed. 

I would be surprised if the effect upon customers of third party financial institutions wasn’t included. All banks in the UK are required to have plans for Operational Resilience. One of the first things that they’ll have needed to have done is identify IBS’s (Important Business Services, not the medical alternative!). I would expect third party payments to have been designated an IBS. 

Sure, they will count each IBS as 1 customer but do they know how many end-user customers of each of their IBS customers were affected? And how & when these end-user customer customers have been informed  / received apologies / received compensation?

I’m quite sure that they will have needed to have considered each IBS in detail. The idea of OpsRes is to consider the impact that an outage would have on the customers (including third party), the bank itself, and the whole market. They would have had to take into consideration that third party financial institution customers would have been affected. 

friolento

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Banks will probably be asking whether they are responsible to the PRA/FCA, or to a Parliamentary Select Committee. If the latter are unhappy with the PRA/FCA, perhaps they should be taking it up with them, rather than attempting to bypass them?

That aside, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Select Committee are aware that the recent Barclays outage also affected numerous indirect Barclays customers, such as those of us whose withdrawals from Gatehouse Bank were delayed. 

I would be surprised if the effect upon customers of third party financial institutions wasn’t included. All banks in the UK are required to have plans for Operational Resilience. One of the first things that they’ll have needed to have done is identify IBS’s (Important Business Services, not the medical alternative!). I would expect third party payments to have been designated an IBS. 

Sure, they will count each IBS as 1 customer but do they know how many end-user customers of each of their IBS customers were affected? And how & when these end-user customer customers have been informed  / received apologies / received compensation?

I’m quite sure that they will have needed to have considered each IBS in detail. The idea of OpsRes is to consider the impact that an outage would have on the customers (including third party), the bank itself, and the whole market. They would have had to take into consideration that third party financial institution customers would have been affected. 

As a Gatehouse customer whose withdrawal got delayed by the Barclays issue, I am quite sure that Barclays have not considered the impact on me. Or if they did, they kept it rather quiet. I got no apology or other communication regarding the issue from Gatehouse or from Barclays. All I could see was a general message on the Gatehouse website, which I don't usually use as I prefer the app, that they are experiencing some delays.

Ballard

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Banks will probably be asking whether they are responsible to the PRA/FCA, or to a Parliamentary Select Committee. If the latter are unhappy with the PRA/FCA, perhaps they should be taking it up with them, rather than attempting to bypass them?

That aside, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Select Committee are aware that the recent Barclays outage also affected numerous indirect Barclays customers, such as those of us whose withdrawals from Gatehouse Bank were delayed. 

I would be surprised if the effect upon customers of third party financial institutions wasn’t included. All banks in the UK are required to have plans for Operational Resilience. One of the first things that they’ll have needed to have done is identify IBS’s (Important Business Services, not the medical alternative!). I would expect third party payments to have been designated an IBS. 

Sure, they will count each IBS as 1 customer but do they know how many end-user customers of each of their IBS customers were affected? And how & when these end-user customer customers have been informed  / received apologies / received compensation?

I’m quite sure that they will have needed to have considered each IBS in detail. The idea of OpsRes is to consider the impact that an outage would have on the customers (including third party), the bank itself, and the whole market. They would have had to take into consideration that third party financial institution customers would have been affected. 

As a Gatehouse customer whose withdrawal got delayed by the Barclays issue, I am quite sure that Barclays have not considered the impact on me. Or if they did, they kept it rather quiet. I got no apology or other communication regarding the issue from Gatehouse or from Barclays. All I could see was a general message on the Gatehouse website, which I don't usually use as I prefer the app, that they are experiencing some delays.

Barclays were never going to contact you as I’d assume that they don’t have access to your contact details. That doesn’t mean that the impact that you suffered wasn’t taken into account.

i should point out that I’m not making excuses for Barclays. Hopefully everyone affected will be adequately compensated.

friolento

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Banks will probably be asking whether they are responsible to the PRA/FCA, or to a Parliamentary Select Committee. If the latter are unhappy with the PRA/FCA, perhaps they should be taking it up with them, rather than attempting to bypass them?

That aside, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Select Committee are aware that the recent Barclays outage also affected numerous indirect Barclays customers, such as those of us whose withdrawals from Gatehouse Bank were delayed. 

I would be surprised if the effect upon customers of third party financial institutions wasn’t included. All banks in the UK are required to have plans for Operational Resilience. One of the first things that they’ll have needed to have done is identify IBS’s (Important Business Services, not the medical alternative!). I would expect third party payments to have been designated an IBS. 

Sure, they will count each IBS as 1 customer but do they know how many end-user customers of each of their IBS customers were affected? And how & when these end-user customer customers have been informed  / received apologies / received compensation?

I’m quite sure that they will have needed to have considered each IBS in detail. The idea of OpsRes is to consider the impact that an outage would have on the customers (including third party), the bank itself, and the whole market. They would have had to take into consideration that third party financial institution customers would have been affected. 

As a Gatehouse customer whose withdrawal got delayed by the Barclays issue, I am quite sure that Barclays have not considered the impact on me. Or if they did, they kept it rather quiet. I got no apology or other communication regarding the issue from Gatehouse or from Barclays. All I could see was a general message on the Gatehouse website, which I don't usually use as I prefer the app, that they are experiencing some delays.

Barclays were never going to contact you as I’d assume that they don’t have access to your contact details. That doesn’t mean that the impact that you suffered wasn’t taken into account.

i should point out that I’m not making excuses for Barclays. Hopefully everyone affected will be adequately compensated.

Valid point that they don't have my contact details. Equally valid is that they have no idea how their issue has impacted me without asking me, and therefore cannot take it into account. If they had been interested, they could have worked with their partners (Gatehouse in my case) to establish the impact in some way.

Ballard

I completely see why you’re angry about the problems that Barclays caused you. I’d feel the same if I’d been affected. Realistically, though, Barclays will view their customers as a whole rather than individually. They will get more data down the line when complaints and calls for compensation are processed, but at this point they’ll be reporting the bigger picture. 

They’ll need to know how many customers were caused intolerable harm by the outage and how quickly they were able to rectify it. They’ll have defined intolerably harm, but it would be the likes of property purchases going wrong. That’s the main metric that they’ll be looking for at this stage. 

TheBanker

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Banks will probably be asking whether they are responsible to the PRA/FCA, or to a Parliamentary Select Committee. If the latter are unhappy with the PRA/FCA, perhaps they should be taking it up with them, rather than attempting to bypass them?

That aside, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Select Committee are aware that the recent Barclays outage also affected numerous indirect Barclays customers, such as those of us whose withdrawals from Gatehouse Bank were delayed. 

I would be surprised if the effect upon customers of third party financial institutions wasn’t included. All banks in the UK are required to have plans for Operational Resilience. One of the first things that they’ll have needed to have done is identify IBS’s (Important Business Services, not the medical alternative!). I would expect third party payments to have been designated an IBS. 

Sure, they will count each IBS as 1 customer but do they know how many end-user customers of each of their IBS customers were affected? And how & when these end-user customer customers have been informed  / received apologies / received compensation?

I’m quite sure that they will have needed to have considered each IBS in detail. The idea of OpsRes is to consider the impact that an outage would have on the customers (including third party), the bank itself, and the whole market. They would have had to take into consideration that third party financial institution customers would have been affected. 

As a Gatehouse customer whose withdrawal got delayed by the Barclays issue, I am quite sure that Barclays have not considered the impact on me. Or if they did, they kept it rather quiet. I got no apology or other communication regarding the issue from Gatehouse or from Barclays. All I could see was a general message on the Gatehouse website, which I don't usually use as I prefer the app, that they are experiencing some delays.

Barclays were never going to contact you as I’d assume that they don’t have access to your contact details. That doesn’t mean that the impact that you suffered wasn’t taken into account.

i should point out that I’m not making excuses for Barclays. Hopefully everyone affected will be adequately compensated.

Valid point that they don't have my contact details. Equally valid is that they have no idea how their issue has impacted me without asking me, and therefore cannot take it into account. If they had been interested, they could have worked with their partners (Gatehouse in my case) to establish the impact in some way.

It's a small but important point to say Gatehouse are not a partner. They are a customer of Barclays.

If you suffered intolerable harm as a result of the incident, that is an issue for Gatehouse to address. Gatehouse have decided to set themselves up with a dependency on Barclays (it would be possible for them to have contingency arrangements to ensure their payments could still flow, or at least that customers who needed access to their savings could still do so).

I once worked for a small bank that used one of the high street clearing banks to process our payments. We had a contingency arrangement where we could send a small volume of payments via a different route. It wouldn't have been as smooth as normal but it would have meant peoples house purchases wouldn't be delayed. And this was a decade ago, well before Operational Resilience became a thing. 

Theleak250

I’m really curious from a technical aspect what actually occurred and why there was no backup/reserve. 

GeoffTF

Theleak250 said:

I’m really curious from a technical aspect what actually occurred and why there was no backup/reserve. 

I expect that the answer is very embarrassing and they do not want us to know.

subjecttocontract

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Ballard said:

friolento said:

Banks will probably be asking whether they are responsible to the PRA/FCA, or to a Parliamentary Select Committee. If the latter are unhappy with the PRA/FCA, perhaps they should be taking it up with them, rather than attempting to bypass them?

That aside, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Select Committee are aware that the recent Barclays outage also affected numerous indirect Barclays customers, such as those of us whose withdrawals from Gatehouse Bank were delayed. 

I would be surprised if the effect upon customers of third party financial institutions wasn’t included. All banks in the UK are required to have plans for Operational Resilience. One of the first things that they’ll have needed to have done is identify IBS’s (Important Business Services, not the medical alternative!). I would expect third party payments to have been designated an IBS. 

Sure, they will count each IBS as 1 customer but do they know how many end-user customers of each of their IBS customers were affected? And how & when these end-user customer customers have been informed  / received apologies / received compensation?

I’m quite sure that they will have needed to have considered each IBS in detail. The idea of OpsRes is to consider the impact that an outage would have on the customers (including third party), the bank itself, and the whole market. They would have had to take into consideration that third party financial institution customers would have been affected. 

As a Gatehouse customer whose withdrawal got delayed by the Barclays issue, I am quite sure that Barclays have not considered the impact on me. Or if they did, they kept it rather quiet. I got no apology or other communication regarding the issue from Gatehouse or from Barclays. All I could see was a general message on the Gatehouse website, which I don't usually use as I prefer the app, that they are experiencing some delays.

Barclays were never going to contact you as I’d assume that they don’t have access to your contact details. That doesn’t mean that the impact that you suffered wasn’t taken into account.

i should point out that I’m not making excuses for Barclays. Hopefully everyone affected will be adequately compensated.

Valid point that they don't have my contact details. Equally valid is that they have no idea how their issue has impacted me without asking me, and therefore cannot take it into account. If they had been interested, they could have worked with their partners (Gatehouse in my case) to establish the impact in some way.

I'm a Gatehouse account holder, I'm not a Barclays account holder but got an email apology from Barclays for the outage......which was a surprise. I have no idea how they got my contact details unless it was via my money transfer out of Gatehouse.