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Barclays expects to pay up to £7.5mn in compensation to customers after an outage at the UK bank meant that more than half of its payments failed over a three-day period last month.
The bank said in a letter to the Treasury select committee — which on Thursday published the findings of a probe into the largest UK banks’ IT outages in the wake of the Barclays incident — that it expected to pay between £5mn and £7.5mn to customers.
Britain’s top nine banks and building societies accumulated the equivalent of more than 33 days of unplanned tech and systems outages in the past two years, according to data collected by the committee. It also found that at least 158 IT failure incidents had taken place between January 2023 and February 2025.
Barclays’ three-day outage started on January 31 and caused turmoil for millions of customers, including those who were trying to meet a deadline to make payments to HMRC after filing their self-assessment tax returns.
The high-street bank confirmed 56 per cent of online payments during last month’s incident failed owing to a mainframe systems failure.
The probe found the UK bank had already paid nearly £5mn in damages as it suffered 33 outages over the past two years, excluding the most recent incident — the highest number of all the banks to have been assessed. This means Barclays could end up paying a total of £12.5mn in compensation owing to outages that have taken place since January 2023.
HSBC suffered 32 outages in that period, the second-highest number, and paid customers more than £200,000 in compensation. NatWest was hit by 13 incidents lasting a total of 194 hours, the largest amount of time, leading the bank to pay out nearly £350,000 to consumers in redress.
“For families and individuals living pay cheque to pay cheque, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience,” said Treasury select committee chair Dame Meg Hillier. “The fact there has been enough outages to fill a whole month within the last two years shows customers’ frustrations are completely valid.”
Barclays UK chief executive Vim Maru said in a letter to the committee that the bank’s management was “deeply sorry for the impact this incident has had on our customers who were not able to access some of our services during the incident period”.
He added that Barclays’ “priority and focus was to act quickly with our customers’ interests always front of mind” while the bank had proactively communicated with customers within the first two hours of the incident, which it flagged to regulators.
