Lloyds Banking Group is "looking into what happened" after some users of its banking apps reported seeing other customers' transactions on their accounts.

The glitch affected customers using the Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax apps.

It has since been fixed, but multiple people claimed on social media to have been able to see information including wage payments, National Insurance numbers, and benefits payments.
In replies to complainants on social media platform X, Lloyds Bank confirmed that some accounts were shown other customers' transaction information.

A Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson told FStech: "We're sorry that some customers experienced an issue viewing transactions in the app for a short time this morning. The issue was quickly resolved and we're looking into what happened."

Despite the quick fix, Cavan Fabris, head of data and cyber at international law firm RPC, told FStech that the incident is likely to qualify as a personal data breach under UK law.
"Financial transaction data is highly sensitive, so banks are expected to have strong safeguards to prevent exactly this kind of cross-account exposure," he said. "If the incident created a risk to customers' privacy or finances, the bank would normally be expected to assess whether it must notify the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) within 72 hours and potentially inform affected customers."

A spokesperson for the UK's data regulator, the ICO, said: "We are aware of an incident affecting some online banking services and we will be making enquiries."

Under UK data protection law, customers are entitled to seek compensation not only for financial losses but also for distress caused by the misuse or exposure of personal data. Whether this applies depends on the scale of the incident and whether harm has arisen, said Fabris.

It is not yet known what caused the glitch, but according to Fabris, technical failures are the most common cause of similar issues. Last year, users of the same Lloyds Banking Group apps were affected by outages on payday in January and February.

This is the second time the ICO has made enquiries at Lloyds this year. In January, it questioned the bank over potential data breaches resulting from its use of aggregated staff banking data during pay negotiations, though a formal probe was not launched.

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