The banking industry has a history of suffering system failures, but little has been done to prevent this type of disruption happening again. Is better business continuity the way forward in an era of risk and uncertainty, and should banks do more to plan for such eventualities? AccessPay would argue that it’s best for your business to get proactive, so you can satisfy customers whatever happens.
Technical glitches
A technical glitch that left 275,000 HSBC customers from receiving their monthly salaries ahead of the 2015 August Bank Holiday Weekend has renewed concerns both in the UK and globally regarding how well banking systems are maintained and provisioned.
Whilst historically system failures have affected many of Britain’s major financial institutions, banks have found themselves under increased scrutiny over the last few years, as the UK economy has grown staunchly from the 2008 Financial Crisis. As a result, any anomalies triggered by a bank that affected businesses and consumers’ ability to access their funds have made front page headlines.
With such daily pressure, it comes as no surprise that banks are starting to consider solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery, with the aim of safeguarding their reputations and retaining customers.
How have the banks reacted?
If the 2008 Financial Crisis has taught British banks anything, it is that they need to put in place responsible contingency plans and business continuity processes in order to ensure their disaster recovery capabilities are bullet-proof in the event of a crisis.
Whilst payment system outages are not on the same scale as a global financial crash, contingency channels, offered to customers when they are unable to make payments through their primary banking link, could help banks avoid compensation costs and investigations from regulatory bodies –along with improving credibility amongst customers.
No stranger to challenging the status quo, Barclays bank has recently announced the provision of a first of its kind, cloud-based contingency access channel in order to boost its commitment to corporate clients. Through a new partnership with AccessPay, Barclays have launched this additional channel for managing payments, so that their corporate clients can count on ‘business as usual’ access in the event of an outage.
With the state of the art, highly secure and highly resilient additional connectivity platform, Barclays will now be in a position to uniquely offer a seamless disaster recovery service to corporate banking clients.
Think about disaster recovery now
With NatWest bank suffering problems only a few days after the HSBC failure and RBS’s 600,000 lost payments fiasco earlier in the year, banks need to act now to prevent further complications.
With financial technology solutions allowing banks to implement additional payment channels at a significantly lower cost than the levels of compensation, they may end up paying for a banking systems glitch, the solution is simple…
Exceed customer expectations and minimise losses by delivering a robust disaster recovery service. This means that if your primary banking channel fails, you can make sure your payment processes continue to run smoothly and customers remain satisfied.
