Banks and other major providers of current account services will be required to publish data on the number of major operational or security incidents that they have experienced, under new plans outlined by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
The measure is part of a range of proposed new disclosure obligations (92-page / 1.40MB PDF) that the regulator plans to impose on firms that operate in the personal current account (PCA) and business current account (BCA) market.
Other information that will need to be published in future includes how long it takes customers to open accounts, and how long it takes to replace a lost, stolen or stopped debit card.
Further information on the time it takes to provide for power of attorney access to personal current accounts, and details of the availability of services related to the accounts, such as for checking balances or paying in cheques, as well as whether 24-hour support is available for such services, will also need to be published, according to the proposals.
"The new rules should provide customers with useful information they can use to choose the current account or payment account that is most suitable for them," said expert in financial regulation Chris Davidson of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com. "It will be interesting to see if the rules deliver the consumer benefits and impact on competition that are sought. The FCA plans to gather information about customers' attitudes and behaviours in 2018 and that should be a good indicator of progress against the objectives."
The new requirement to disclose information on the number and type of major operational or security incidents will build on obligations firms will face under new Payment Services Regulations to report such incidents to the FCA.
"We propose to require firms to publish the total number of major incidents for which they submit an initial report to the FCA under the regulations, in the reporting quarter and in the last year, and also the number of these incidents for each of online banking, telephone banking and mobile banking," the FCA said in a new consultation paper.
"We see benefits to requiring firms to publish consistent information on major incidents which is comparable between providers. We recognise that firms already put significant resource into improving the resilience of their systems, but this information will enable them to compare their performance with other providers and potentially to compete on the resilience of their systems. It will also allow commentators and customers to review performance and factor this into their choice of account and account recommendations," it said.
The new disclosure requirements would apply to firms that operate more than 70,000 personal current accounts for consumers, or 15,000 business current accounts. The reforms, if confirmed post-consultation, would see changes made to the FCA's Banking Conduct of Business sourcebook.
Firms will generally be required to publish the service information on their websites, but the FCA said it also plans to require the banks subject to new open banking standards to publish the information via application programming interfaces (APIs) they are creating to implement those open banking requirements. In addition, firms that elect to use APIs to facilitate third parties' access to payment accounts and payment account data, in line with their duties under new EU payment services laws (PSD2), will be obliged to disclose the information via their APIs too, the FCA said.
The firms must denote the service performance information "by channel", meaning separate data for mobile, online and telephone banking.
The FCA said: "We want to make it easier for customers to access and assess information about providers' service, enabling them to make informed comparisons and choose the provider that best suits their needs. We also want to incentivise BCA and PCA providers to improve their service and performance."
The FCA said it expects price comparison websites to make use of the data firms use and for the information also to be of interest to the media. The regulator said it could require the information to be disclosed from as early as August 2018.
The FCA's consultation is open until 25 September.
