High volumes of transactions force Nationwide to ‘queue’ inbound payments after 10m transfers overnight
Following news that customers of Nationwide were unable to carry out any payments, the third time this month, thousands of angry Brits took to social media to demand an explanation.
This afternoon, the bank explained to City PM that it took the decision to “queue” inbound faster payments, where money is sent to and from accounts.
“As a result of extremely high volumes of transactions on the first working day of the year we took the decision to temporarily queue inbound faster payments,” a Nationwide Building Society spokesperson said.
“To put this in context, more than 10m payments were processed overnight. This has been done to ensure we can manage and process those payments, which were taking much longer than normal due to the numbers received,” he added.
“We hope to get our systems back to normal and apologise for any inconvenience caused as a result of these delays.”
He added that members do not need to resend any payments as they will be processed as soon as possible.
Also, the move does not impact bulk payments, such as wages, direct debits and standing orders and members can still access their funds and the app is still working as normal, Nationwide stressed.