Bank of England officials were last night investigating the worst disruption to Britain’s banking payment systems in nearly nine years.
Home buyers and sellers may have seen deals held up as a result of the outage, which lasted for about five-and-a-half hours yesterday.
The Bank, which is run by governor Andrew Bailey said a ‘technical issue’ hit its real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service and CHAPS high-value payments system, which handle hundreds of billions of pounds of transactions each day.
It meant the systems were unable to open as normal at 6am. The problem was resolved by around 11.30am leaving a backlog of payments to be processed.
The Bank of England said: ‘We do not anticipate that there will be any outstanding payments to settle when we close the system this evening.’
Probe: The Bank of England, which is run by governor Andrew Bailey (pictured) said a ‘technical issue’ hit its payments system
A similar disruption, lasting nine hours, occurred in October 2014. That prompted an apology from then-governor Mark Carney, who launched an independent review.
Officials at the Bank last night were understood to be treating the latest episode as a ‘serious incident’. Staff were looking into the causes of the disruption and how they could prevent it from happening again.
The Bank gave little detail about what was behind it in a brief statement issued shortly after midday.
‘This morning, we experienced a technical issue which prevented us from opening our real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service and CHAPS high-value payments system,’ it said.
‘The issue has been resolved and settlement will resume shortly.’
Day to day consumer financial services – such as the online ‘faster payments’ service between individual bank accounts, debit and credit card transactions, and cash machines – were not affected by the glitch.
RTGS is used to settle payments, averaging £775billion every day, between major financial firms which hold accounts at the Bank of England.
It underpins core economic activity such as purchasing goods or paying salaries, settling money owed by banks owed to one another as a result of such transactions.
CHAPS, the UK’s high-value payments system, processes an average of 200,000 individual payments every day, to the value of £351billion.
About three quarters is represented by wholesale financial transactions.
But CHAPS can also be used for big consumer transactions such as making down payments on a house purchase or when transferring money overseas.
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