Bank of Ireland tightens controls in UK after competition watchdog warning

Breached rules requiring it to send banking transaction histories to former account holders

Tue, 22 Jun, 2021 - 15:23

Geoff Percival

Bank of Ireland has said it has been working to improve its procedures in the UK after Britain’s competition watchdog warned it, and other banks, over regulation breaches.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) warned Bank of Ireland, and British banks Monzo, NatWest, and Virgin Money over breaching rules requiring them to send banking transaction histories to former account holders.

In total, nearly 150,000 customers were not provided with the necessary information quickly enough, the CMA said.

Monzo was responsible for the bulk of the breach, accounting for over 143,000 former customers.

Under Britain’s competition rules, lenders must send customers a transaction history within 40 days of a customer or small business closing their accounts, with at least 95% sent within 10 working days.

The CMA said the four banks were now sending out the required information and it would take further action if the failures were repeated.

A spokesperson for Bank of Ireland said: “We take our regulatory and customer service responsibilities extremely seriously.”

“We have provided the former customers affected with their transactions histories and have apologised for the delay in issuing these and any inconvenience caused. We have also implemented a range of procedures and controls to help ensure that this issue doesn’t reoccur in the future.”

A spokesperson for UK challenger bank Monzo said: “Since we identified the issue and reported it to the CMA in February 2021, we’ve fixed the problem and are telling affected customers that we can send them their transaction history if they’d like.

“This was an admin error, and we’ve also said sorry to the customers involved."