The Bank of England has announced that Deloitte will lead the investigation into what went wrong with its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system on 20th October, causing chaos as payments were blocked.
The RTGS, which handles around £575 billion worth of large money transfers each day, crashed just over a month ago, stopping the Clearing House Automated System (Chaps) in the process. Chaps also processes roughly £277 billion of payments each day.
The Bank took nearly 10 hours to fix the glitch and had to put through many urgent payments manually, but managed to process all 142,759 payments submitted to its system before the extended deadline.
Deloitte, the auditing and consulting firm that has also been tasked with looking into Tesco’s profit black hole, will seek to find out what caused the problem, whether the system is robust and well managed, and whether the BoE handled the issue effectively enough. It will also assess the Bank’s existing back up plans and make recommendations for the future.
The firm will make its report early next year.
