Payment disruption, what happened and what we did

We want to explain what happened over the last two days, what we did about it, and where things stand now.

On Monday 21st September, the Co-operative Bank had a major technical issue after planned work on its digital banking systems over the weekend.

This was a problem with the Co-operative Bank’s systems, not CLEVR Money’s.

Their Business Online Banking service was unavailable for almost the whole day. This meant we could not send payments that use that system, including automatic benefit payments and loans.

Our own payment system continued to work throughout. Customers were still able to make withdrawals through the CLEVR Money app as normal. This is because we use a different bank for this process.

At around 2:15pm, the Co-operative Bank’s system came back online for about 15 minutes. We used that short window to import customer benefit payments and create the payment back to you. Unfortunately, the system went down again before the bank processed the money back out and it stayed unavailable for the rest of the day.

We were not given any extra information by the Co-operative Bank about how long the problem would last.

We kept customers updated through a notice in the CLEVR Money app throughout Monday, using the information available to us at the time. That information was limited because we had not been given a recovery time or any further detail from the bank.

We also made a choice to put our staff resources into working on the problem and finding a solution, rather than replying to individual messages where we had no new information to give. Everything we knew at the time was included in the app notification.

On Tuesday morning, their system was still unstable. We could access it at times, but payments still could not be sent.

So we built a way around it.

Our team worked throughout the disruption to make sure affected customers could access their money without waiting for the Co-operative Bank’s system to recover.

We created a separate account for everyone affected by Monday’s failed payments and moved the money due into it. This involved thousands of transactions and took some time to put in place. There are no balance restrictions on this account, so the full amount can be withdrawn through the CLEVR Money app.

This was live on Tuesday 22 September.

We also sent an app message and text message to customers whose benefit payments had been received on Monday, explaining how to access their money.

Today’s benefit payments have now been processed and we have also been able to send the automatic payments back to customers.

Major banking outages like this are unusual, but when they do happen they can have a significant impact on customers.

We know that delays involving money people can quickly cause real problems, and we completely understand the frustration caused when money is delayed.

It was also a very difficult situation for our staff. They were dealing with a problem they could not fix directly, with very limited information from the bank, and all they wanted was for the service to be restored and customers to get their money.

Our team worked throughout the disruption to reduce the impact and put an alternative solution in place as quickly as possible.

We do ask that people remain respectful when contacting us. Frustration is understandable, but threatening or abusive messages to our staff are not acceptable.

The technical failure was outside CLEVR Money’s systems, but our focus throughout was on reducing the impact and getting customers access to their money as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience while we worked through it.