When Amelia's bank experienced an IT failure on its systems, she couldn't use her banking app and thought her bank card wasn't working.
What happened
Amelia is paid on the last day of every calendar month. One pay-day, Amelia joined her parents at a restaurant to celebrate their anniversary. She wanted to treat them, but when the bill came her card was declined.
There’d been an IT failure at her bank and it seemed that Amelia didn’t have access to her money or her accounts.
Her parents had to cover the cost of their anniversary meal and lend her money to cover her bills. The outage lasted a few days. Amelia complained to her bank, who apologised and offered her £25 for the inconvenience.
But Amelia didn’t think this was enough and brought her complaint to us.
What we said
We looked at the evidence, including the bank’s records, and saw that Amelia could have used her card despite the IT outage. This was clear because her current account records didn’t show any declined card payments, including any indication that her card had been declined at the restaurant.
We thought it was possible the restaurant had a problem taking payment. If Amelia’s card had been declined because of the outage, there’d be a record.
We also saw that Amelia’s direct debits went out two days later once the bank’s systems were working again. There was only evidence of one missed payment from Amelia’s account. And Amelia’s bank accepted that this was because of the IT outage.
It was also clear that Amelia’s banking app wasn’t updating properly over the weekend of the outage. This would have been very frustrating and gave her the impression that she couldn’t use her card or withdraw cash either.
So, we upheld Amelia’s complaint in part, for the bounced direct debit and the lack of app update, and we told her bank to pay her a further £75 for the inconvenience she’d been caused.