Mr. Ed Sibley:

The Deputy may recall from our last appearance that I referenced issues and weaknesses in IT capability in some of the banks. That remains the case today. We certainly have a degree of concern around IT resilience and the level of investment that is needed in some, although not all, of the banks. I am very limited in terms of what I can say about the specific incident but I will probably be able to address the thrust of the Deputy's question. Our overriding view is that customers of banks have a legitimate and rightful expectation that they can access their funds, execute payments and so on. This is entirely dependent on the resilience and availability of the banks' IT systems. Inevitably, over a long period of time, incidents will happen that result in IT outages. This is part of the nature of IT. We certainly look to make sure that those incidents are minimised and that when they do occur, they are fixed as quickly as possible and there is clear communication to customers around what is happening, how the quickly the issue will be addressed and that if customers are out of pocket, they will gain redress. In respect of what we are doing with IT, and to follow on from the Governor's remarks, we recognise that this is a very significant risk for the financial system. This is why we set up a dedicated IT risk inspection team in late 2014. We have undertaken 19 inspections across the banking system since then and have issued over 150 findings in terms of requirements for banks to improve how they look at IT to make sure they are resilient in terms of security and the capability of the IT system improves. We have issued 90 findings relating to the domestic retail banks, about half of which have been closed and about half of which are still open, so there is work to be done and we are making sure it is being done.