‘Critical’ Bank of England payments system fails
The Bank of England is investigating after its high-value payments system went offline on Monday for around six hours.
Officials are trying to establish the root cause of the problem – but do not believe a cyber attack is to blame at this stage.
The Bank described the outage of its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service and CHAPS (Clearing House Automated Payment System) as a “technical issue”.
In a later update on Monday afternoon, officials said the issues had been resolved and “all CHAPS payments submitted to the Bank are settling normally”.
“We do not anticipate that there will be any outstanding payments to settle when we close the system this evening,” a Bank spokesperson added.
CHAPS is mainly used by banks and other financial institutions to settle high-value money market and foreign exchange transactions.
But it is also commonly used by solicitors and conveyancers to complete property transactions, as well as by individuals to buy high-value items such as cars or to pay a deposit for a house.
On its website, the Bank of England describes RTGS and CHAPS as playing a “critical role in the UK economy and [which] support our mission of monetary and financial stability”.
RTGS and CHAPS process an estimated £1trn in transactions every day.
This month is set to be the busiest to move home, according to analysis by comparison site reallymoving. It says August has been the busiest for the past 11 years, and is on course for the same again in 2023.
An RTGS outage in 2014, which lasted for around nine hours, is estimated to have delayed the sales of about 700 properties, which were subsequently unable to complete that day as planned, according to a later report by the Bank.
Dozens of people applied for compensation but the Bank ended up paying out only nine claims totalling just over £4,000.
An investigation later concluded the failure was caused by an IT glitch which followed “configuration changes” made during the previous weekend.
Around 205,000 payments a day on average are made using CHAPS.