After hectic payday technical difficulties, HSBC, Nationwide and Virgin Money appeared to have resolved their issues by the start of the new week. But has it been done without any long-term damage?

At around 2pm on Friday, HSBC offered an update via X, stating: “Online and Mobile Banking services are back up and running and customers can now view recent transactions. The payments issue affecting multiple banks is also resolved. We’re really sorry to those impacted and will continue to monitor systems closely.”

While the main relief will be the return of the servies that customers rely on, but there is the unwanted addition of anxiety in wondering whether this could happen again.

Manual processes don’t work due to the way modern banking systems are built

Hicham Mabchour, VP UK at Dynatrace, suggests that the situation shows that banks need to update the way they monitor their systems. He commented: “Online and mobile banking outages create disruption and always seem to come at the worst possible time – like payday – which only adds to the impact on their customers. Whenever an outage arises, banks need to be able to instantly trace the issue back to the precise root cause, rather than waste hours scrambling to find the problem. Manual processes don’t work given the way modern banking systems are built. In fact, 88% of technology leaders in the banking industry say their technology stack has gone beyond human ability to manage. AI-driven approaches have now become mandatory, allowing IT teams to manage their environments holistically with a unified approach to observability, rather than using a fragmented array of monitoring tools.

“Part of the challenge in preventing outages is that there are so many problems that can lead to IT outages, including hardware failures, software bugs, cyber-attacks, and human error. Banks urgently need to update the way they monitor their systems, so when outages occur, they can restore their services much faster and minimise the impact of potential disruptions on their customers.”

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