Last year, thousands of customers at one of the UK’s biggest banking groups were locked out of their accounts. This cut people off from their own money, leading to declined cards, missed payments.
VP Head of Data & AI at Valtech.
Across the UK, major banks and building societies racked up more than 800 hours of unplanned tech and systems outages last year. That’s more than a month of disruption spread across the financial services millions of people rely on every day.
I don’t believe this is bad luck or just a one-off error. It’s something deeply structural and predictable. And it won’t fix itself.
The structural problem underneath the headlines
The headlines zero in on the disruption or the compensation bills or the apologies over social media. What gets missed is why it keeps happening in the first place.
Here’s what I think is going on: In a lot of these cases, data is sitting in silos, systems don’t stay properly aligned and no one has clear ownership of the key domains. So when something changes in one place, it doesn’t stay contained. It ripples through other systems in ways that aren’t always obvious.
A dependency breaks somewhere downstream, a third-party service doesn’t behave as expected and the impact becomes harder to trace than it should be. Recovery slows because teams are spending time working out what actually changed before they can even start fixing it. This isn’t a legacy technology problem or a budget problem. It’s a data ownership problem, and the people running these organizations know it.
The UK’s particular problem
Banks aren’t short on ambition, and there’s no shortage of investment or early deployment. In fact, the vast majority of AI initiatives are now moving from pilot to production.
But complete rollout is a totally different story. In the US, around a third of banking executives say their AI initiatives consistently reach full deployment. In the UK, barely one in ten can say the same, and UK respondents are more than twice as likely to say projects never make it past the pilot stage. I don’t think this is a technology gap. It’s an organizational one.
UK institutions have spent years digitizing on top of legacy infrastructure, acquiring new capabilities without properly integrating them. Each layer adds complexity, more handoffs and more unclear ownership. That’s the accumulated cost of organizational decisions that were easier to defer than resolve.
At that rate, UK banks risk getting lapped not just by their US peers but by the fintechs who are already drawing customers away.
The governance bottleneck
There’s a second structural problem looming beneath the data fragmentation issue. Decision-making in financial services is still highly centralized. The majority of major tech investments still require C-suite approval, with only a handful of these delegated to the data or digital leaders closest to the systems and best placed to act. By the time approval arrives, the moment to act decisively has passed.
Those who’ve got it right have named who owns what. Decision rights sit closer to the people actually doing the work, governance is folded in from the start, not as an afterthought. And when things go wrong, which is inevitable, recovery comes faster because nobody has to spend the first hour working out who’s responsible. That’s the kind of margin most banks can’t currently rely on.
What the minority are doing differently
Only a handful of financial services firms are planning to move to product-led, cross-functional team structures with clear data ownership and accountability. I’d argue that’s the operating model most likely to produce faster delivery, clearer accountability and fewer of the outages that result in front-page headlines.
Among firms that have embedded intelligence directly into live customer journeys, results are already showing up. Real-time fraud alerts, payment resolution support and event-driven interventions are all cited as direct drivers of customer loyalty. These are the outcomes when data is clean and teams have the authority to act on it.
In a market where switching has never been easier, that’s the difference between keeping a customer and losing one.
What the outages are really telling us
Last year’s outage headlines prompted understandable focus on compensation and consumer protection. But I think that’s the wrong question. The more important one is why these incidents keep happening, and what it would take to stop them.
That comes down to knowing who owns what, giving teams the authority to act at speed and building governance in from the start rather than adding it on when something breaks.
Banks can’t keep treating these as isolated incidents. They’re symptoms of operating models that haven’t kept pace. Until that changes, the next outage isn’t a question of if. It’s when.
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