Customers Wait Up to Two Days as Faster Payments’ ‘instant’ Solution Suffers an Outage

Thursday, October 11th, 2018

Talk digital payments in the UK and Faster Payments is one of the names that come up. UK’s Faster Payments transfers finances between bank accounts in just two hours and clears them almost immediately for customers and retailers looking for cheapest merchant services U.K.

But that wasn’t the case on July 8 when the nation’s main avenue for moving funds experienced an outage? The slipup occurred from 13:00 to 17:30 BST on Sunday, while an entire 769,480 payments were in processing.

Approximately 1% of these payments – around 7,694 – were still pending two days later.

According to Jonny Evans of Chorley, the hitch caused inconveniences. He was trying to pay for a Kia car when the £3,000 transfer from his savings account to his regular account got “caught up” in the outage.

Thus apart from suffering delays, the 37-year old also had to pay an overdraft charge. “I transfer money a lot between these accounts, and it happens straight away. I might have made this one during the outage, and now I have to pay an overdraft charge,” Evans said.

“It is frustrating, especially now that the holidays are here. It is a complicated matter to solve. I’ve had to get home early from work to visit the bank and make long phone calls to them. When such things go wrong, it takes a while to sort out.

Faster Payments, through a spokesperson, said that no one “should be left out of pocket” due to the outage and backlog.

The spokesperson said that those with a similar case as Mr. Evans should call the bank responsible for issuing any charges to get a refund.

He also said that the backlog was caused by some payments being declined during the outage.

For such payments, manual checking was used to ensure that there was no double payment in the event they were resubmitted.

“Faster Payments sincerely apologizes to all its affected customers. We are liaising with our tech provider Vocalink and all related bodies to make sure ensure all pending payments are processed as soon as possible,” he said.

“Nobody who’s a victim of this fault will be left out of pocket – Faster Payments will hold up the industry’s combined agreement to make protect customers financially in such situations. We have started an investigation into what caused the outage and working together with our tech supplier, and our goal is to process all the outstanding payments.”