28th Feb 2025 10:06
(Alliance News) - Nationwide Building Society and First Direct have both confirmed issues with their online banking systems on Friday morning, leaving many customers without access to funds on payday.
It is the second month in a row that major banks have been hit by IT issues around payday, with experts saying the online banking systems often struggle with the high rate of activity as wages and bills go in and out of accounts at the end of each month.
In messages posted online, both banks said they were working to return their systems to normal.
Nationwide said in a message on its website that "some incoming and outgoing payments are delayed at the moment", but that "everything else is working normally".
It said direct debits and standing orders were working as normal, but that payments were in a queue and would arrive soon, adding that customers did not need to do anything.
Meanwhile, First Direct confirmed on its website that both its mobile and online banking were "experiencing issues with payments".
According to service status website DownDetector, users were reporting issues with a number of other banks, but no others have so far confirmed any issues.
At the end of last month and in early February, Barclays PLC, Lloyds Banking Group PLC and Halifax were all hit by service outages which left customers unable to access funds on or just after payday.
Fintech expert Chris Skinner told the PA news agency in the wake of those outages that banks were finding it "too hard to keep up" with fast-moving technology.
"I think the world is spinning so fast with technology that the challenge we have is no-one's keeping up, particularly regulators and lawmakers," he told PA.
"And so the regulators and lawmakers need to have people who do better due diligence.
"I think there's an issue here with reliability, service and resilience, and that's the accountability of the people who are organising the structures, both from within the business, and those who look over the business in terms of the regulators.
"At the moment, I think both are probably finding it too hard to keep up."
He added that the vast array of modern tech systems needed to operate in the banking world today meant that firms have "such a smorgasbord of things they have to work with" that the "competence of keeping up with these changes is really challenging every bank".
Skinner, who also runs industry blog The Finanser, said that flurry of outages of Fridays – and sometimes close to paydays – was likely due to banks planning software updates for weekends as it tends to be a quieter time to carry out such work.
By Martyn Landi, PA Technology Correspondent
source: PA
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