Last checked at 
(Adds more detail, background)
By Huw Jones
LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) - Britain's financial regulatorswill examine whether computer systems used by the country'sbanks and building societies are fit for purpose, after asuccession of problems which left millions of customers unableto get any cash.
Royal Bank of Scotland customers could not make orreceive payments in March 2013, which followed a fault ninemonths earlier that cost 175 million pounds to rectify andprompted the lender's chief executive to waive his bonus.
Separately tens of thousands of Lloyds customerswere unable to use their debit cards and ATM cash machines forseveral hours on a Sunday in January.
The Financial Conduct Authority, the Bank of England and itsPrudential Regulation Authority will launch the review to beconcluded by early 2015, the FCA said in a statement on Friday.
"To access and manage our money we depend on the banks' ITsystems to be reliable. But IT outages continue, interruptingkey banking services," Clive Adamson, FCA director ofsupervision, said.
"We want to make sure that the banks have resilient ITsystems in place that are able to cope with consumer demand, socustomers aren't left financially stranded or disadvantaged,"Adamson added.
The investigation will also look at how engaged boards atbanks are with the issue of IT resilience and whether they havethe expertise needed to challenge the decisions taken by theexecutive.
The probe follows letters sent by regulators to the chairmenof the nine biggest banks and building societies in 2012, askinghow resilient their computer systems are and what concerns theyhave, the FCA said.
The review will assess what progress has been made so far bythe banks and whether more needs to be done.
Andy Haldane, a senior official at the Bank of England, hassuggested a common network for the banks to ensure adequateinvestment and make it easier for competition in banking toflourish, a step Lloyds Banking has said would turn anyfault into a network-wide failure. (Reporting by Huw Jones, Chris Vellacott; Editing by GregMahlich)
