Thousands of supposedly ‘instant’ payments could still be outstanding – due to a problem on Sunday that meant some were ‘rejected’.
Banks and building societies use the Faster Payments system – with transferred money usually available straight away – or within 2 hours.
It has apologised, advising customers who’ve been hit with charges as a result to speak to their bank.
Faster Payments Service is a UK banking initiative to reduce payment times between different banks’ customer accounts from the three working days that transfers take using the long-established BACS system, to typically a few seconds.
Statement From Faster Payments
Intermittent Faster Payments service issue on Sunday 8 July
Faster Payments experienced intermittent issues with its central infrastructure between 1-5.30pm on Sunday 8 July, causing delays to payments sent during that time.
Whilst the vast majority of the backlog of payments were successfully processed later on Sunday, we are aware that a limited number of payments that were submitted between 1-5.30pm are still outstanding.
We would like to sincerely apologise to all affected customers – we are working hard with our technology supplier and all of our participating institutions to ensure the outstanding payments are processed as quickly as possible.
No one who has been affected by this issue will be left out of pocket – the industry has a collective agreement to make sure customers are protected financially in situations like this. Anyone who has been affected by a payment that hasn’t been received should speak to their own bank, building society or other provider.
We are now working with our infrastructure supplier to conduct a full investigation into the cause of the issue.
