HSBC has promised to send delayed payments to frustrated customers by Saturday morning after a day of chaos left hundreds of thousands of people without cash on payday, ahead of the bank holiday weekend.
Early on Friday, it emerged many companies that bank with HSBC were unable to pay their staff or suppliers after its IT systems failed.
Thousands of people, many of them not HSBC customers but unable to access their salaries, vented their fury on Twitter and jammed lines to the bank’s call centres.
Early in the afternoon, HSBC admitted that 275,000 payments had gone awry.
Some companies were forced to make emergency cash payments to staff. Carl Chapman, who runs an IT services business in London, said none of his 130 staff were paid. He said: “We obviously pushed all the right buttons to make payments a few days ago and assumed HSBC would do its bit. We discovered instead, at about 7.30am on Friday, that none of our staff had received their money.”
Many people were furious at the slow response from HSBC. Nearly 10 hours after the glitch emerged, it issued a statement promising all payments would be processed by Saturday morning.
The bank said: “HSBC apologises for the significant inconvenience caused to customers by today’s payments problems.
“We are now processing the payments so that they reach the beneficiary accounts as quickly as possible. The majority of payments will be completed over the course of the afternoon and early evening, with any remaining payments completed overnight.”
Many account holders complained that after their salary cheque failed to appear, direct debits for outgoings such as mortgage and rent payments bounced, leaving them facing steep charges. HSBC said it will refund the costs to its own customers and those of other banks.
It said: “We are committed to ensuring that no one loses out as a result of today’s unacceptable problems. We will work with our customers and the other banks including providing compensation where appropriate.”
HSBC’s IT failure is the latest in a series to hit Britain’s banks. RBS, which runs NatWest and Ulster Bank, was fined £50m after an IT meltdown in 2012, while in 2014, customers of Lloyds and TSB were unable to use debit cards and ATMs following computer problems.