By Mark Kleinman, City Editor
The banking regulator has demanded that Britain's biggest lenders improve the robustness of their IT systems amid concern about a persistent stream of service breakdowns.
Sky News has learned that a letter was sent to the chairmen of the banks by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) last month, asking them to provide more details about the availability, resilience and recovery capabilities of their IT functions.
Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Santander UK are among those understood to have been contacted by the PRA.
The banks have been given until mid-December to answer questions posed by the regulator, which has powers to instruct them to overhaul their investment plans in order to ensure the continuity of critical services.
It is unclear whether the PRA wrote to the bank chairmen before the Bank of England was itself forced to apologise on 21 October after a glitch in the UK's banking payment system forced the shutdown of key services for several hours.
Two years ago, the then Financial Services Authority challenged the chairs of the nine biggest lenders to set out plans to avoid significant infrastructure failures.
News of the latest letter comes a day after Sky News revealed the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is proposing to fine Royal Bank of Scotland a record sum over the IT failure in June 2012 which left customers without access to their money for several days.
The development means that an end to the FCA's enforcement investigation, which began in April 2013, is now in sight, although the precise timing could be delayed if RBS decided to contest the regulator's findings.
RBS could receive a discount of up to 30% on the proposed penalty if it agrees to settle within the 28-day window under FCA rules.
Sources put the scale of the likely fine to be imposed on RBS at "several tens of millions of pounds", which would rank it among the largest ever handed out by the City regulator for offences unrelated to the manipulation of financial markets.
Sky News revealed earlier this year that the FCA was to tackle the robustness of banks' IT systems as one of its priorities for this year.
Last December, RBS suffered another systems outage on the busiest online shopping day of the year, the third time in about 18 months that such a problem had prevented customers from using cards, cash machines and online banking services.
Other banks have also been hit by IT problems which have affected customer-facing services on a regular basis.
RBS has since pledged to invest more than £1bn in its digital capabilities and IT systems during the next three years.
The PRA and the banks declined to comment on the latest letter.
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