UK funding financial institution IT outages value £600k an hour

UK funding banks misplaced £2.4m on account of main IT outages prior to now 12 months, with community points, human error, and outdated or legacy programs being the primary causes.

The most recent survey from monetary providers IT consultancy GFT, which was carried out by Censuswide, additionally discovered that the typical IT outage lasts over one hour and prices the funding financial institution affected £600,000. The survey acquired responses from greater than 200 IT decision-makers at funding banks within the UK.

Krista Griggs, international account director, Capital Markets at GFT, mentioned: “As scrutiny from regulators, counterparties and shoppers intensifies, funding banks face rising strain to minimise disruption and safeguard enterprise continuity.”

Monetary penalties from regulators and the lack of clients are growing the entire value of IT outages. However GFT’s analysis discovered there are obstacles that get in the way in which of funding banks making their IT infrastructures extra dependable. It reported that 39% of the IT decision-makers questioned mentioned that regulatory complexity was a barrier to resilience, whereas 37% cited inner resistance to alter and 28% highlighted a scarcity of inner abilities.

Wanting ahead, the IT decision-makers questioned mentioned that cyber threats, AI integration challenges and legacy programs will probably be potential main causes of outages.

Within the wider banking sector, the prices of those issues are large. Information acquired from 9 of the UK’s largest banks by MPs on the Treasury Committee, revealed at the very least 158 banking IT failures between January 2023 and February 2025, equating to greater than 800 hours of service unavailability.

Barclays Financial institution reported essentially the most incidents (33) through the interval and reported it might pay out as much as £12.5m in compensation because of outages over the 2 years in scope.

Allied Irish Financial institution, HSBC and Santander had been hit by 32 incidents every, whereas Nationwide Constructing Society reported 18 outages, NatWest 13 and Lloyds Financial institution 12. NatWest reported essentially the most downtime at 194 hours, adopted by HSBC with 176. The banks advised MPs that programs and inner software program malfunctions had been frequent causes for the IT failures.

However it’s not at all times inner failures that trigger outages, with finance companies in the present day closely reliant on IT companies, significantly massive cloud service suppliers. A latest IT drawback at Amazon Net Providers (AWS) brought on a 14-hour outage on 20 October. It originated within the public cloud large’s US-East-1 datacentre area in North Virginia and brought on large-scale disruption to a bunch of firms internationally, together with UK finance large Lloyds Banking Group.

The Monetary Conduct Authority UK has warned that it wish to strengthen its management over third-party suppliers to the broader sector, equivalent to AWS.

In line with a report within the Guardian, Sarah Pritchard, the FCA’s deputy chief government, when requested whether or not it was worrying for the regulator that firms like Amazon should not designated as crucial third-party suppliers to the finance sector, which implies they keep away from regulatory oversight, mentioned: “We wish to see the system strengthen. And we stand able to supervise collectively with the PRA [Prudential Regulation Authority] and the Financial institution of England when there’s a designation that’s made.”