Barclays suggests foodbanks for customers struggling with outage
This article discusses Barclays UK's controversial response to a technical outage, where the bank allegedly suggested struggling customers visit local foodbanks—a suggestion critics argue is inappropriate for a multi-billion pound institution that should prioritize operational resilience.
Is it ever acceptable for a multi-billion revenue tier 1 bank experiencing a technical systems outage to suggest customers who can't transact consider visiting their local foodbank as an alternative?
According to this Sky News article, that's what Barclays UK did.
Foodbanks serve a critical purpose across the UK, but not to prop up the technology infrastructure and operational resilience of a banking giant with UK specific £7.6 billion income and pre-tax profits of £2.9 billion (2023 figures).
There is a very binary viewpoint that should percolate across every bank, regardless of its 'tier' status, but especially for Tier 1 players: When it comes to banking – just like with Google, Netflix, or Monzo – your systems should be engineered to ensure the key features are always available.
