This gets on my nerves. At least twice a month Barclays do this. Don’t they realise that people use their banking 24/7 these days? Are they really stuck that far in the past?
Come on Barclays, why can’t you be like Monzo? Can’t wait to fully switch over my current account for good when it’s out of “preview”.
Every bank needs to run maintenance at some point but every fortnight? Like honestly.
Pretty shocking! Nationwide even worse lately. I mean why would anyone want to use their bank on their days off work when they have free time? Might as well just offer online banking 9-5 mon-fri
Hey… some of us need to work some Sundays!
It’s all a point of principle, I’ve heard of nationwide doing this too yes. Why are their systems so outdated that they need to take it all offline to run an update?!?
They have to do it at some point. The recent legislation changes are huge and require major infrastructure changes for them. It’s going to require outages unfortunately.
That’s not an excuse - sure they could disable “write” operations like wire transfers but at least leave a read-only view of the transaction list available - hell they could even cache it and have a disclaimer saying the data displayed is outdated - still better than complete downtime.
Exactly! And even then it shouldn’t be so bad that they have to knock it out for half a day!
Barclays are switching 900,000 people to new sort codes due to banking regulatory changes. I’m sure that may have something to do with the downtime taking longer recently. It is something they may need to prepare for.
While this is frustrating it’s a consequence of legislation and the way some banks have decided to approach ring fencing.(Which in turn is driven by capital requirements etc.).
It’s not a simple fix either since it affects all those involved with payments not just Barclays’ own internal systems.
There is an indirect benefit to Monzo though. The fact that Barclays and some other banks are changing sort codes means that direct debit originators are going to have to update their validation lists and will be encouraged by the big banks to do so. This means less likelihood that payments to or from the new Monzo sort code of 04-00-04 will get rejected. 