Deloitte probes Bank of England payments crash
The Bank of England yesterday hired Deloitte to investigate the crash in its payments systems last month.
On 20 October the, Real-Tim Gross Settlement (RTGS) system failed, causing faults in the Chaps payments channel, which is used for large-scale transactions.
The system is largely used by companies and banks to transfer funds, but individuals also use it for big transactions such as house purchases.
The Bank of England was removing one bank from the system and adding a new one – an unusual operation, which resulted in a minority of payments failing to go through.
It suspended all such payments while it worked out what had gone wrong.
Now the Bank’s Court – equivalent to a company’s board – has hired Deloitte to discover why the problem was not spotted in advance and how the Bank can avoid such a problem again.
The probe will also look into the governance of the RTGS system as well as the way the Bank’s staff reacted to the outage.
The Bank of England’s role has hugely expanded in recent years as it takes on new powers to regulate the financial system, which has led to a serious shake-up of its management structure and to the appointment of more senior staff.
However, it is not yet clear if any individuals will be held accountable or be punished.
RBS was fined £56m last week over its payments systems failure during the summer of 2012, with the Bank of England itself levying part of the punishment.
But the Bank of England is expected to treat its own crash less seriously as its problems lasted for one day only, and all payments went through that day.
By contrast, RBS’ payments lasted for several weeks and affected more customers.
Deloitte’s investigation is expected to report back to the Court of the Bank of England in early 2015.