Are you entitled to recompense from Lloyds, TSB, Halifax and Bank of Scotland outages today? I thought I’d bash out a quick note to explain.
This afternoon, substantial numbers of customers of Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and TSB (which, works on the same system) have found their debit cards not working when they try and pay in stores and elsewhere, and in some instances ATMs are not giving them cash.
We haven’t yet heard from the Lloyds Group, I suspect it needs to get its team together on Monday morning to decide what it’s policy will be, yet the precedent for this is how NatWest and RBS dealt with their similar issues last year.
More so, I would argue the RBS/NatWest issue has set the ‘standard industry practice’, which is enforceable by the Financial Ombudsman. So if Lloyds fails to do the same, as a bare minimum, you could take it to the Ombudsman.
At the time NatWest effectively said if you can prove you are out of pocket because of its outage (eg, late payment fines with other banks, extra hotel charges etc.), it would give you your money – it didn’t however, have a policy to pay compensation for distress.
I would suggest Lloyds will and must do the same. It is worth noting though that actually, when some who had been put in genuinely distressful circumstances spoke to NatWest, it did pay out compensation in some cases, so it’s worth calling Lloyds if that’s happened to you.
Lloyds says the problems are now fixed and I will update any news on this tonight on my Twitter feed (@martinslewis). Also, please use that to let me know if Lloyds’ statement doesn’t match up to your experience.
Ps. Apologies for the poor formatting of this blog post and the slightly scrappy prose. Normally it is laid out and subbed by my team, but as it’s a Sunday evening I wanted to get something out quickly as many are asking about it.
Pps. Thanks to Mrs MSE for stepping in as an impromptu proof reader.