Banking operations ‘back to normal’ after glitches
NatWest and Nationwide confirm their banking operations have returned to normal after thousands of customers had problems with online banking and debit cards.
Customers of NatWest were hit on Thursday by technical problems with debit card transactions and online banking.
The problems arose on the same day that customers of Nationwide were also plagued by a hitch, which saw more than 700,000 customers have debit purchases taken twice, making some of them overdrawn.
An RBS spokesman said: “Online banking is now fully operational and debit card transactions are processing as normal. We continue to monitor the systems closely and will keep our customers fully informed. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Although it has not yet been revealed what caused the problems at RBS, the Nationwide issue was attributed to “human error” and meant some customers who used their Visa cards on Tuesday had duplicate payments also taken out on Wednesday.
The building society, whose catchphrase is “On your side”, recently benefited from a surge in activity from customers looking to switch accounts following NatWest’s IT meltdown last month, where customers were left for days without access to cash, and Barclays’ Libor-fixing scandal.
‘One-off incident’
A Nationwide spokeswoman yesterday said 704,426 of the society’s four million current account holders had been affected, of which fewer than 50,000 are thought to have been adversely impacted, by wrongly incurred charges or fees.
She apologised to customers and described the mistake as a “one-off incident down to human error”.
She said transactions would be corrected overnight and any charges incurred as a result of the problems would be repaid “in full”.
A Visa spokeswoman said there was no problem with Visa cards and all of its systems had been and were working correctly.
Leigh O’Riordan said that he had paid for his annual rail season ticket from Billericay in Essex to London, at a cost of £3,422, but he found the payment had been taken out twice.
“In my case, this means I now do not have access to my money. It took me a while to get through to Nationwide, but they were very good and they apologised.”
Anger on Twitter
Nationwide customers also vented their anger on the society’s Twitter account, which said in response to queries: “An issue with debit cards is affecting some customers. Sorry, accounts will be corrected ASAP.”
One customer wrote: “#nationwide have had a problem with visa transactions. Everything I bought yesterday has gone through twice!!!”
The blunder will come as a blow to a building society which has successfully marked itself out as offering something different from the big banks.
Nationwide said earlier this month that it had seen a 45 per cent increase in people transferring their main account to the society, including branch, online and telephone applications.
A statement issued by Nationwide yesterday afternoon said: “We have identified an issue where some current account card transactions made on July 24 were duplicated on July 25.
“This is a one-off isolated incident and is down to human error.
“The duplicated transactions will be corrected overnight.
“We would like to apologise for the inconvenience this has caused and we can assure customers that should they incur any related charges these will be refunded in full.”