The Bank of England is suffering a serious loss of face today after the computer system it uses to make large scale payments between UK banks broke down.
Part of the Bank’s 30-year-old Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS), the Real Time Gross Settlement system is an essential tool for the smooth running of City operations, processing around £277 billion worth of payments every day.
The technical outage, which has not yet been fixed, means that high value fund transfers cannot be made between commercial banks. However, the bank is urging the public to remain calm as payments will be made – eventually.
“The Bank of England has identified a technical issue related to some routine maintenance of the RTGS payment system and has paused settlement while we resolve it,” said the Bank in an official statement today. “We are working to address this issue as quickly as possible, and restart the RTGS payment system in a controlled manner. The most important payments are being made manually and we can reassure the public that all payments made today will be processed.”
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