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Groundhog Day for RBS as IT glitch leaves customers with payments delays

RBS customers are still waiting for payments to turn up, despite the technical problems being sorted.
Written by Jo Best, Contributor

As many as 600,000 payments due to be made through RBS' banks have been hit by delays after a fresh IT failure at the company.

RBS' customer help Twitter feed broke the news on Wednesday morning. "Some customer payments are missing this morning - we are investigating this issue as a matter of urgency," RBS_Help tweeted.

RBS, whose brands include NatWest and Ulster Bank, said on Wednesday that a technology problem had held back the payments. While the problem has now been fixed, according to an RBS spokeswoman, customers may have a wait of several days before the payments are completed.

The company has set up a helpline on 03457 242424 for those affected, and said that customers whose payments have been delayed won't be left out of pocket as a result.

"We are aware of an issue which has resulted in a delay to payments and Direct Debits being applied to some customer accounts. We have fixed the underlying issue, we apologise for the inconvenience caused and we are working flat out to get these payments updated for our customers no later than Saturday. To any customers concerned about the implications of this issue, we advise them to come into a branch or get in touch with our call centres where our staff will be ready to help," RBS said.

The bank has been hit by a series of IT problems in recent years. In June 2012, RBS customers' balances were not properly updated due to problems with its batch processing, leaving some unable to access funds. The company set aside £175m to cover the cost to customers of the outage, and was subsequently fined £56m by regulators for the failures.

The following month, some RBS customers found themselves unable to use online banking, or their debit cards.

In early 2013, the bank experienced a "hardware fault" that once again left customers unable to access their bank accounts online and caused problems with its ATMs. Later that same year, another IT problem saw customers unable to make online payments or withdraw cash.

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