A further banking outage on the final day of the month has left the home moving sector enraged as conveyancers faced an uphill battle to get transactions complete. This latest event lays bare the challenges of digitising the home moving process and what safeguards are in place to protect home movers and professionals.
Reports of outages with Lloyds Banking Group, including Halifax, Nationwide and TSB caused panic on Friday afternoon; with irate home movers and professionals taking to social media to vent their frustrations. On X/Twitter Lloyds advised customer CHAPS payments were still going through as were payments made through phone banking.
This latest outage follows issues with Barclays bank a the end of January, which took from the Friday morning, through to the Sunday to fully resolve. These latest issues appear to have been resolved more speedily, with Lloyds bank posting on X/Twitter ‘Our app and online banking services are now working as normal.’ at lunchtime on Friday.
The financial services market has experienced a number of outages in recent years which alongside the impact of cyber attacks in the case of Simplify in November 2021 and CTS in November 2023 has left conveyancers concerned about how greater digitisation of the home moving process could be affected by future outages.
In February the government announced plans to modernise the home moving process, starting with a 12-week project to identify the ‘design and implementation of agreed rules on data for the sector, so that it can easily be shared between conveyancers, lenders and other parties involved in a transaction.’ In a widely publicised announcement, the digitisation of documents and data will be a key tenet of the work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MCHLG) saying the current inaccessibility of information in non-machine readable formats is a barrier to efforts to improve the home moving process.
“I’m curious about the industry’s contingency plans for a future where everything is entirely dependent on digital systems. What safeguards are in place?”
said one commentator on social media.
“Who wants to digitise Conveyancing. I rest my case”
Added another.
In the case of the CTS outage Today’s Conveyancer spoke with firms at the time who had limited or no access to emails, case management or phone systems and had lengthy manual workarounds, piecing files together as they went along. They explained at the time with no access to matters they were reliant on sent and deleted emails to access search reports, enquiries and other information. The knock-on impact was once systems had been restored, all the manual work would need to be input back on to the case management system.
As ever, there were calls for calm and understanding on Friday, with reminders the sector was all in the same boat, and trying to deal with it as best they could.
“Bank outage-Lloyds banking group are down which is Halifax, Bank of Scotland and TSB. Please can everyone work together to make this less painful being the last day of the month.”
“This is no one’s fault clients solicitors conveyances or anyone else so let’s just try to come up with creative solutions to get clients moved. And help each other out.”
One Response
And what does social media’s loudest and toxic voice of technology have to say on all this? Nothing of course so Trumpian.