UK Treasury Committee wants info from PayPoint over service outage
Nicky Morgan demands information about the cause of the failure and expresses her concerns about the lack of timely updates provided to PayPoint’s customers.
Retail technology, services and payments provider Paypoint plc (LON:PAY) has become the latest company to come into the focus of the UK Treasury Committee due to a service disruption on Saturday, July 21st.
Rt Hon. Nicky Morgan MP, Chair of the Treasury Committee, has written to Dominic Taylor, Chief Executive of PayPoint. In the Letter, Ms Morgan asks PayPoint’s CEO to provide answers to a set of questions not later than July 27, 2018.
These questions concerns details about the scope of the disruption and the number of merchants and customers affected. Ms Morgan would also like to know about the cause of the failure.
She also expresses her concerns about the lack of timely information about the outage:
“For how long were you aware of the system failure before issuing your first public statement on the incident? As of the morning of 23 July I have been unable to identify any statements regarding the system failure on your website”.
PayPoint has published an official Statement regarding Treasury Committee letter. It says:
“PayPoint can confirm that it has received a letter this morning from the Treasury Committee which we will be responding to in due course. As has been reported we experienced a technical issue affecting PayPoint transactions in certain stores impacting around one third of our retail network on Saturday 21 July.
We worked very hard throughout the day to support retailers and to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Whilst any interruption of service is significant, the majority of our network remained fully operational throughout the day, providing very good local coverage with over 98% of households within close proximity to a fully operating store. All services in impacted stores were back to normal by late afternoon.
We again apologise for this rare disruption of service, which we believe was a one off isolated event and are undertaking a thorough review to minimise the risk of reoccurrence.”
This is the latest in a set of financial services IT failures that has affected UK residents over the past several weeks. In early June, the Treasury Committee sought explanation from Charlotte Hogg, Chief Executive Officer (Europe) of Visa, over the outage that affected Visa cardholders across Europe, including the UK, on June 1st.
