Home Business NatWest and Nationwide Accounts Face Problems

NatWest and Nationwide Accounts Face Problems

Just weeks after the IT debacle at NatWest that led to customers being unable to use their online banking facilities, problems have cropped up once again. There were also problems with their card network, leaving some account-holders unable to make payments.

Coming so soon after the last fiasco, many customers must be wondering what on Earth is going on. The only communication during the problems was through the company’s Twitter account, which sent out these messages:
“Some customers may have issues with their Online Banking and using their debit cards at the moment.”

“Working as hard as we can to resolve. We’ll post updates as soon as we have more information.”

Nationwide also face problems, which will be a worrying development for the many customers who transferred their accounts to the building society following the earlier IT problems at NatWest. Hundreds of thousands of account holders (a figure given by the bank) had all their debit card payments from Tuesday 24th July replicated on Wednesday 25th July, meaning they were charged twice for a whole host of things.

Nationwide also only communicated on Twitter, with a message reading “An issue with debit card transactions is affecting some customers. Sorry, accounts will be corrected ASAP”, though they later released an official statement. They promised to fix all of the transactions, and any customers who found themselves adversely affected by the problems, going overdrawn or having payments declined for instance, would be financially reimbursed.

Because the errors on Nationwide accounts seemed to be happening only to Visa cards, there were some suspicions that it may be a Visa system failure rather than the Nationwide one, but Visa have denied this is the case, stating “the issue is not a result of problems with the Visa Europe systems which have been, and are still, running without defect.” It seems that even building societies are not without their problems.

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