Barclays may have to pay up to £12.5 million (nearly $16 billion) in compensation to its customers. The second-largest UK bank will reportedly have to make this payment due to technology outages its customers experienced over the past two years. The compensation figure was revealed in a letter to MPs by the bank following data published by the Treasury Committee which highlighted a significant 33 days’ worth of unplanned tech and system outages across nine of the UK’s largest banks and building societies in the last two years, a report claimed.
According to a report by The Independent, the Treasury Committee, a cross-party group, initiated inquiries with the UK chief executives of these banks to confirm the extent of the IT failures and the estimated compensation for affected customers. This investigation was prompted by a recent Barclays outage in January, which caused days of disruption for customers, notably coinciding with payday and the self-assessment tax return deadline. During this incident, Barclays highconfirmed that over half of online payment attempts failed, underscoring the severity of the disruption.
What Barclays said about this compensation
As per the report, the bank is expecting to pay between £5 million (nearly $6.4 million) and £7.5 million (nearly $9.5 million) in compensation for the latest outage. Moreover, the bank is also estimates paying £5 million for other incidents that occurred between January 2023 and December 2024.
In a letter published by the Treasury Committee (seen by The Independent), Barclays UK CEO Vim Maru wrote: “We acknowledge that through no fault of their own, some of our customers and clients may have suffered loss or distress and inconvenience.”
Barclays also informed the committee that the outage was due to a software issue within a segment of its UK mainframe operating system and was not for a cyber attack.
Estimates indicate that across nine banks and building societies, at least 158 IT failure incidents occurred between January 2023 and February 2025, the report added.
However, this number does not include Barclays’ recent outage or the recent disruptions to other banks’ online services. Some of the commonly cited causes for these incidents include problems with third-party suppliers, disruptions from system changes, and internal software malfunctions.
