The Treasury Committee has written to CEOs at nine banks and building societies to request information on the scale and impact of IT failures which have affected their businesses over the last two years.
The letters follow the recent outage at Barclays which locked customers out of their accounts for three days from Friday 31 January - the HMRC self-assessment deadline and a common time for wages to be paid into personal accounts.
The Bank of England has previously outlined that, while one-off outages at a single firm are not necessarily a risk to the UK’s financial stability, IT failures which affect a systemically important firm or multiple organisations at the same time could be.
MPs are asking firms for the number of instances and amount of time in hours each current account provider has suffered IT failures which prevented customers using their services.
The Committee is also seeking to collect data on the number of customers who have been affected and how much each firm has paid out in compensation to those affected. The reason for each outage has also been requested.
In the letter to Barclays, the Committee asks more detailed questions about the recent outage. These include how customer service teams responded to distressed consumers and what action the Board took to rectify the issue.
Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier MP, says the rapidly declining number of high street bank branches makes the impact of IT outages even more painful.
“When a bank’s IT system goes down, it can be a real problem for our constituents who were relying on accessing certain services so they can buy food or pay bills," she says. “For it to happen at a major bank such as Barclays at such a crucial time of year is either bad luck or bad planning. Either way, it’s important to learn what has happened and what will be done about it."