As many as one out of every ten online banking customers of a major retail banking giant had to put up with noticeable delays this past weekend, it was recently reported.
High street bank Barclays left its online banking customers in the dark over the weekend, with the financial service provider’s website proving slow to load on one of the most hectic days of the month in light of the impending ISA deadline this Thursday. The bank has been slowly implementing improvements to its online banking platform since the beginning of the year, sources say.
A spokeswoman for the bank issued an apology to any customers who had experienced a slow response from the bank’s website, as frustration had been mounting, with many social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook lighting up with angry comments from customers put out by the delays. However, the problems were resolved in time for this week, with response times slowly recovering from the sudden increase in traffic.
According to the Financial Services Authority, UK banking customers complained about Barclays more than any other bank in 2011, with more than 533,000 complaints. The last six months of the year saw a massive 281,484 complaints alone, the FSA figures also revealed, and the lion’s share of complaints dealt with payment protection insurance mis-selling claims – the number of complaints related to banking services numbered 146,316 in the second half, with a little over half of these being upheld in favour of the customer.