Customers at Citizens Financial Group were prevented on Wednesday from accessing their online and mobile accounts, in what the company has described as an issue with its technology.
Processing Content
At about 8:30 a.m., the Providence, R.I., company announced on Twitter that its digital channels were unavailable to customers. A Citizens spokesman confirmed the outage, describing it as a “technical issue.” The underlying problem was resolved by the early afternoon, though "some customers" were still unable to access their accounts due to "residual access delays," according to the spokesman.
"I want to reiterate that we apologize to customers for any inconvenience," the spokesman said in an email. No additional details about the nature of the problem or the number of customers affected were provided.
Rain falls outside a Citizens Bank location in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Photographer: Kelvin Ma/Bloomberg
The $153.5 billion-asset Citizens has experienced a number of technical glitches in recent months, according to media reports.
The company suffered an outage in late April, leaving customers unable to access their accounts for several hours. Additionally, in March, Citizens customers in Cleveland discovered missing payments and unprocessed online bills, in what the company described as a “vendor processing issue.”
Citizens' outage on Wednesday is the latest a string of tech-related snafus across the banking industry.
Guidance documents from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network heightening bank scrutiny of individual tax identification numbers in mortgage applications could discourage banks from issuing those kinds of loans.
The newly minted Fed chairman announced working groups for his five top policy priorities and strictly refrained from forward guidance in his debut press conference Wednesday afternoon.
The state would join New York in governing the up-and-coming credit product. Industry and consumer advocacy groups say there's still room for improvement.
The clarification spells out what banks can share to stop scams. The Bank Policy Institute welcomed it but wants Congress to write the protection into law.