Lloyds Banking Group has paid out £139,000 in compensation to customers affected by a recent IT glitch that allowed customers to see other people’s transactions.

The compensation has been paid out to 3,625 customers for the incident on 12 March.

A letter published today by the Treasury Select Committee revealed that up to 447,936 Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers saw other people's transactions or had their data shared with other users.

This led to 114,182 people clicking on other people’s transactions when they became visible, who then may have been shown more detailed information such as account details, national insurance numbers and payment references. No customers have, so far, been identified as suffering financial loss.

The cause of the incident has since been identified as a software defect which occurred during an overnight update.

Last week, the chair of the Treasury Committee, Meg Hillier, posed a series of questions to Lloyds about the glitch and has requested further updates from Lloyds in one month and then again in six months’ time.

“Modern banking methods mean we can now perform a variety of tasks on our phones in a matter of seconds, and almost anywhere,” Hillier said.

“What this incident brings into focus is the fact that there is a trade-off. By moving more interactions with our bank online, we place our faith in technology which can suffer unpredictable errors.

“It’s critical that consumers understand this, and that’s why my Committee continues to push banks to be transparent when things go wrong.”

In March last year, the Treasury Committee found that nine of the largest banks had accumulated at least 33 days’ worth of IT outages over the preceding two years.

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