The Bank of England announced on Thursday that it experienced a temporary outage in its CHAPS interbank payment system, which handles over 360 billion pounds ($467 billion) on an average day. However, the central bank expects all transactions to be settled by the end of the day.
The outage in the high-value payment system was linked to an issue at Swift, the Belgium-based organization banks use for secure international messaging.
We are pleased to confirm that the third-party supplier has restored service following their earlier issues, and CHAPS payments are settling as normal,” the Bank of England stated.
Retail payment systems, including debit cards and cash machines, were unaffected by the outage. Most Britons encounter CHAPS when making high-value payments, such as house purchases, and a prolonged outage can leave home-movers stranded.
CHAPS processes over 90% of total sterling payments by value, as banks use it to settle sterling money market and foreign exchange transactions, and large businesses rely on it for time-sensitive payments to suppliers and tax authorities.
The CHAPS system has faced technical issues in the past, including problems in August last year and in 2014 when the BoE’s Real-Time Gross Settlement system, which underpins CHAPS, did not function normally for several hours.
Swift reported that Thursday’s problem was due to an operational incident that delayed the processing of services it provided to customers, including those operating financial market infrastructures like CHAPS. “This incident was not cyber-related, and our technical teams have successfully restored impacted services,” Swift said in a statement.
The Bank of England has previously cautioned the banks it regulates against being overly reliant on third-party infrastructure.