HSBC, Nationwide Building Society and TSB collectively let down a total of nearly 170,000 customers by failing to provide payment transaction histories, according to the competition watchdog.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has written to the two banks and building society, said the failures are “not acceptable”.
The providers breached part five of the retail banking order, which requires that payment transaction histories should be provided to customers when they close their account.
These act as important evidence of a customer’s creditworthiness if they choose to apply for credit, a loan or mortgage elsewhere.
Without such evidence, it might be harder or more expensive to take out credit, a loan or mortgage.
HSBC, Nationwide and TSB customers should not have to face this issue when looking to switch supplier and the CMA stands ready to take further action if these failures are repeated— Adam Land, CMA
TSB failed to send payment transaction histories to 105,607 customers for over a year.
Nationwide Building Society failed to send these histories to 51,185 customers for over five years.
And HSBC failed to send payment transaction histories to around 12,200 customers for nearly five years.
The providers reported the breaches to the CMA and they have been putting agreed changes to their systems in place to prevent a recurrence. The CMA said it will monitor their future compliance closely.
While the watchdog does not have the power to impose financial penalties on those who breach CMA competition remedies, it expects that the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill will eventually provide it with this power, increasing the incentive for firms to comply with CMA remedies in future.
Adam Land, senior director of remedies, business and financial analysis at the CMA, said: “It’s not acceptable that these three providers have failed to provide important information to a total of nearly 170,000 customers, despite this order being in place since 2017. We will be watching closely to make sure they don’t let people down again.
“HSBC, Nationwide and TSB customers should not have to face this issue when looking to switch supplier and the CMA stands ready to take further action if these failures are repeated.”
A statement from TSB said: “This was an administrative error that TSB identified and reported to the CMA. We’ve already put in place robust processes to prevent this happening again.”
A spokesperson for HSBC UK said: “We are sorry some of our former customers did not receive their payment transaction histories, required by the CMA, when they closed their business current accounts.
“As soon as we discovered the issue, we took various steps to improve our processes in order to avoid this happening again.”
A Nationwide spokesperson said: “Once we became aware of this issue, we immediately put in place steps to ensure this doesn’t reoccur.
“We apologise for any inconvenience caused to those members who didn’t receive their payment transaction histories when they closed their current account.”
