Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment his Department has made of the effect on the (a) economy, (b) consumers and (c) small and medium-sized enterprises of the Visa outage on 1 June 2018.

We take the operational resilience of the finance sector and any detrimental impacts very seriously. HM Treasury works closely with the Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) (collectively the ‘Financial Authorities’) – as well as other organisations where relevant such as the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) - to improve the resilience of the sector and to respond to any major disruption. As part of this work the Financial Authorities routinely assess the impact of any major operational disruption and as noted in the record of the Financial Policy Committee meeting on 19 June 2018, this incident will inform further work by the regulators.

You may find it helpful to note that the Chief Executive of Visa Europe set out the impact of the service disruption in a letter to the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee. This is available at:

https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/treasury/Correspondence/2017-19/visa-response-150618.pdf