Payment News

Payment Infrastructure Needs Resilience

Payment technology has had a bad time in the UK recently. Four major firms have had IT issues that hit contactless payments– two food outlets (McDonalds and Greggs), two supermarkets (Sainsbury’s and Tesco). The McDonald’s issue was said to be due to a ‘global technology outage’. This series of failures has led the Payments Systems Regulator to investigate and speak out.

In the same week Nationwide, a building society, experienced a problem that meant some payments to and from other banks and building societies were delayed, direct debits, standing orders and card payments were unaffected.

The BBC has reported that the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia experienced a technical problem that allowed customers to withdraw and transfer money that was not in their accounts. As so often happens, this was a system update that went wrong. Customers withdrew cash from ATMs and sent money transfers worth £31 million.