Barclays could be required to compensate its customers with up to £12.5 million, or almost $16 billion. According to reports, the second-largest bank in the UK will have to make this payment because of the two-year-long technological breakdowns that its clients have endured. Following data released by the Treasury Committee that showed a noteworthy 33 days of unscheduled tech and system outages across nine of the UK’s largest banks and building societies in the previous two years, the bank disclosed the compensation amount in a letter to Members of Parliament, according to the report.
As per a media source, the cross-party Treasury Committee contacted the UK CEOs of these banks to verify the magnitude of the IT malfunctions and the approximate compensation for impacted clients. A recent Barclays outage in January that disrupted customers’ lives for days, particularly between payday and the deadline for self-assessment tax returns, served as the impetus for our inquiry. More than half of online payment attempts failed during this event, according to Barclays High, highlighting how serious the outage was.
What Barclays said about this compensation
According to the source, the bank anticipates compensating for the most recent downtime with between £5 million (about $6.4 million) and £7.5 million (approximately $9.5 million). Additionally, it is estimated that the bank would pay £5 million for other occurrences that took place between January 2023 and December 2024.
“We acknowledge that through no fault of their own, some of our customers and clients may have suffered loss or distress and inconvenience,” stated Vim Maru, the CEO of Barclays UK, in a letter viewed by The Independent and released by the Treasury Committee.
Additionally, Barclays told the committee that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack but rather of a software problem with a portion of their UK mainframe operating system.
According to estimates, between January 2023 and February 2025, there were at least 158 IT failure occurrences across nine banks and building societies, the research further stated.
The current outage at Barclays and the recent interruptions to the online services of other banks are not included in this figure, though. Internal software issues, system change interruptions, and issues with third-party vendors are some of the often mentioned reasons for these accidents.
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