Bank of England resolves tech glitch; Monzo shows JPMorgan how to handle outage news
The Bank of England says it has resolved an IT glitch which hit bank-to-bank transactions in the wholesale markets yesterday.
The problems arose during a regular internal IT update, the Bank says, “indirectly affecting our ability to process a limited number of transactions for wholesale counterparties by the usual means”.
The backlog was dealt with by manual workarounds.
In a statement issued today, the BofE says: “Systems are now working normally although there is some catch-up work to complete. We expect to be able to process business as normal today but in order to catch up from yesterday, wholesale counterparty transactions may be dealt with somewhat later in the day than usual.”
While rumours surfaced that the high value Chaps system was experiencing problems this morning, the Bank stresses: “The real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service and the Chaps system continue to operate as normal, so – as was the case yesterday – the general public will see no impact on any of their banking services.”
In 2015, The Bank of England was ordered to improve contingency arrangements and strengthen its crisis management framework following an independent review of a ten-hour Chaps breakdown the previous year.
The central bank took over the running of Chaps in November, moving responsibility for risk management and stability from direct member-run private sector firm ChapsCo.
Separately, in the US JPMorgan Chase has been experiencing technical problems following a day-long IT outage that left customers unable to use online and mobile banking services. While normal service was resumed late in the evening customers were left unimpressed by the bank’s failure to explain the cause of the glitch.
Just as well JPMChase pledged to spend some its tax cut windfall on opening 400 new branches over the next five years.
The giant US bank could take a leaf out of the transparency play book of UK app-only bank Monzo, which today published a thoroughgoing and comprehensive post-mortem on an outage that affected both its pre-paid card and currenc account services last week.
