Online and mobile banking ‘glitch’ fixed – RBS

RBS/NATWEST said it has fixed problems which left frustrated customers locked out of their online and mobile accounts.

Earlier, RBS chief executive Ross McEwan said the bank feels customers’ “pain” when problems arise with its systems – but he added that such incidents were becoming less frequent.

Customers started reporting problems at around 5am yesterday and a statement issued later in the morning by the bank said the issues had been resolved.

The issues had affected Nat West, Ulster Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland customers.

The latest disruption came just a day after Barclays customers were left struggling to log in. Those issues have also now been fixed.

A statement from RBS said: “We would like to apologise to customers who experienced issues logging into their online and mobile banking accounts this morning, this issue has now been resolved.”

Meanwhile, HSBC is carrying out routine essential maintenance tomorrow which means its mobile banking app and online banking will be unavailable for personal customers for a period in the early hours.

The RBS banking group has nearly eight million customers who use mobile and online banking.

Telephone banking and ATMs were not impacted by yesterday’s problems.

Earlier yesterday, Mr McEwan told LBC: “We feel the pain for our customers every time this happens.

“We’re still working through what the issue is there...

“Absolute apologies to customers who are used to using mobile – and more and more are using mobile.”

He said: “We make a lot of changes to our technology on an ongoing basis – it may be related to that but we just don’t know at this point.”

Asked about previous glitches, he said such incidents had “dropped dramatically”. He said: “If you look back at 2014 we had something like 300 incidents, last year we only had 20, so we are certainly improving the organisation and how it operates for our customers.”