The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that the three lenders had not sent out payment transaction histories to 168,992 customers when they closed their current accounts.

Section five of the Retail Banking Order states that banks must supply this information free of charge to a customer when they close a personal or business bank account.

These documents are vital as they act as evidence of a customer’s credit history if they apply for credit such as loans or mortgages in the future. Without this history, it can be harder or in some cases more expensive to take out credit.

But the CMA said TSB failed to send payment histories to 105,607 customers for over a year; Nationwide failed to send this information to 51,185 customers for over five years, and HSBC failed to send it to 12,200 customers for nearly five years.

The breaches were self reported to the CMA by the banks. The CMA has written to the banks today and said as processes have been put in place to prevent this happening again, no further action will be made but it will monitor their compliance closely.

Within the letters, the CMA said there had been a “substantial failure” by the banks to comply with all of their regulatory obligations.

It does not have the power to impose financial penalties but said that it expects that the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill legislation which is currently making its way through Parliament, will provide it with this power in the future.

The measure to require banks to provide a customer’s banking transaction history to them was introduced by the CMA after it found that some consumers were worried about switching current accounts because they thought they might lose access to their banking history. As this is often required by lenders when a person applies for credit, the CMA introduced this rule in 2017 so switching accounts would not make it more difficult to apply for credit.

Adam Land, senior director of remedies, business and financial analysis at the CMA, said: “It’s not acceptable that these three providers have failed to provide important information to a total of nearly 170,000 customers, despite this order being in place since 2017. We will be watching closely to make sure they don’t let people down again.”

“HSBC, Nationwide and TSB customers should not have to face this issue when looking to switch supplier and the CMA stands ready to take further action if these failures are repeated.”

‘We are sorry’

A spokesperson for HSBC, said: “We are sorry some of our former customers did not receive their payment transaction histories, required by the CMA, when they closed their business current Accounts. As soon as we discovered the issue, we took various steps to improve our processes in order to avoid this happening again.”

A Nationwide spokesperson, said: “Once we became aware of this issue, we immediately put in place steps to ensure this doesn’t reoccur. We apologise for any inconvenience caused to those members who didn’t receive their payment transaction histories when they closed their current account.”

A TSB spokesperson, said: “This was an administrative error that TSB identified and reported to the CMA. We’ve already put in place robust processes to prevent this happening again.”