One of the problems with a large-scale outage for a large financial institution is it will cascade down to other banks. So if a bank the size of RBS/NatWest (c

One of the problems with a large-scale outage for a large financial institution is it will cascade down to other banks. So if a bank the size of RBS/NatWest (comparable to Bank of America, or Chase) falls over and you don't have an account it might not affect you - unless your employer uses that bank to carry out their pay runs, in which case you're not going to get paid. Several newspapers were reporting people whose house purchases fell through because their solicitors were using NatWest as an intermediary. (I actually bank with Nationwide as well, although their online service is a bit odd. Then again, when is that not true for a bank?)