Crédit Agricole customers in France urged to check accounts after payment issues

Crédit Agricole customers are being urged to check their accounts after the bank faced issues which took the instant virement (payment) system offline on Wednesday and Thursday.

The issues meant that payments did not leave customer accounts, although this appeared to be the case on the devices on which they were set up.

Staff devised a workaround whereby customers who realised there was an issue scheduled transfers for the following day, which went through without difficulty.

“It was an internal problem which first occurred on Wednesday morning, was fixed, and then happened again on Thursday,” a spokesman for Crédit Agricole Group told The Connexion.

“We are confident now that the problem has been fixed and things are back to normal.”

The bank stated that unsuccessful attempts to send money on Wednesday and Thursday had been removed from the system, so customers did not need to be concerned that they would unexpectedly appear later on their bank statements.

“But we always urge customers to check their accounts often, so that if there are problems, they can pick up on them quickly and contact their councillors,” the spokesman said.

“Incidents like this re-enforce that message.” 

Virement payments in France

French banks lagged behind most European counterparts in introducing systems of bank-to-bank payments, known as virements, made possible by changes from the European Union and the European Central Bank.

When they did introduce virement systems, many French banks, including Crédit Agricole, imposed a fee for instant payments, until the ECB instructed them to cease doing so.

The banks argued that their reluctance to introduce the virement system was due to security concerns. 

Since the introduction of the systems, there has been a rise the number of cases of fraud where people were persuaded to send virements to the wrong accounts, even though these remain rare.

The latest available figures on bank fraud relate to 2023 and were published by Banque de France in 2024. 

They show €312 million in virement fraud for that year, equal to 0.001% of all transactions, at a time when the use of virements had risen by48%.

Parliamentarians are in the process of passing a law that will create a national register of bank account numbers used by criminals for virement fraud.

It may come into effect early next year and will enable banks to introduce the automatic blocking of any transfers until they have been thoroughly verified.