The Competition and Markets Authority has castigated HSBC, Nationwide and TSB for "significant failures" in transaction history reporting for personal and business customers switching banks.
Under provisions of the Retail Banking Order, banks must provide SMEs with a turnover of less than £6.5 million with a full payments transaction history when switching accounts. Similar rules apply to retail customers swiching banks.
For SMEs, the measure is espcially important as they need to access their transaction history when applying for fresh credit.
THE CMA's strongest reprimand was aimed at HSBC, which failed to send an estimated 12,200 payment transaction histories to former business account holders, a failure that the CMA deemed "unacceptable".
"The CMA considers it unacceptable that a large, regulated entity such as HSBC manifestly failed to implement an effective process to ensure that BCA (business current account) customers that closed their accounts would be provided with their Payment Transaction History in accordance with its legally binding obligations.
"This failure led to breaches which have been ongoing since the Order came into force, and HSBC’s processes, systems and staff were not capable of detecting and reporting these breaches until December 2022. In addition, the inability for HSBC to determine the scale of these breaches due to the inadequacy of its systems and processes is a further concern."
Similar reprimands were dealt out to TSB, which failed to send over 105,000 payment transaction histories to former business and personal account customers, while Nationwide failed to provide these to around 51,000 former personal current account holders during the period between when the rule was enforced and May this year.
The CMA has refrained from penalising the banks, which have each taken steps to ensure they remain compliant with the rules.