MPs grill Barclays on outages as HSBC raises cyber attack concerns
Bank chiefs have said they are ramping up spend on cyber defences after a spate of attacks have blighted the retail sector.
HSBC’s UK boss Ian Stuart told the Treasury Committee the bank’s work on cyber protection and IT infrastructure was the “biggest expense in the business”.
“Cyber security is at the top of the agenda and it does worry me because you can be attacked and we are being attacked all the time,” Stuart told MPs.
A critical supplier to Tesco and Sainsbury’s – Peter Green Chilled – became the latest firm to be hit on Tuesday morning after confirming it was being held to random by hackers.
This followed a string of assaults on major retailers including Marks & Spencer and Dior.
Stuart said lenders were dealing with a thousand payments a second and up to eight thousand IT changes a week.
“The defence mechanisms you put in are absolutely critical,” he added.
Bank bosses were pressed on the recent outages that had consumers unable to access their accounts for up to two days.
Barclays faced a major outage in January that impacted customers’ payments and transactions.
The banking giant’s UK boss, Vim Maru, said: “We have learnt the lessons and we are acting on them. We’ve worked very hard to ensure customer disruption is as little as possible.”
But in a fiery exchange with Dame Harriett Baldwin, the MP reminded the banker: “It happened again a month later.”
Baldwin said: “It’s month end, it’s pay day and your systems go down – twice in a row. How worried should our constituents be about the legacy systems that your bank and other banks on this panel have?”
Maru insisted the February outage was a “short disruption” caused by a “software issue” related to a third party.
Outages abound
A Treasury Committee report in March revealed nine of the UK’s biggest banks and building societies were down for over 803 hours – the equivalent of 33 days – over the last two years.
Barclays topped the list for most outages at 33, but had been able to reduce the length to 93 hours, shorter than some rivals.
HSBC was close behind Barclays with 32 incidents, but nearly double the amount of hours, shooting up to 176.
Stuart told MPs: “Every time something happens at other banks, we do not cheer, we go straight to read across.”
He said no lender could “guarantee a 100 per cent uptime” but the “skill is how quickly you can recover.”