The Bank of England’s CHAPS service was affected by a global payments outage yesterday (18 July), the UK central bank confirmed in a statement.
The BofE acknowledged the global issue delayed some high-value and time-sensitive payments, including house payments. The bank informed the public via X that it is working with a third-party supplier and relevant authorities to resolve the issue.
“We are mindful of the impact this is likely to have and are working closely with a third party supplier, industry and other authorities to resolve the issue as promptly as possible,” the BofE’s statement read.
“If you are concerned about a CHAPS payment you plan to make or receive today, please contact your bank, or other payment service provider.
“Retail payment systems are unaffected so people and businesses can continue to use cash points, card payments and bank transfers as normal.”
CHAPs is the bank’s high-value payment system, designed to provide settlement risk-free and irrevocable payments. Several thousand financial institutions make CHAPS payments via the programme’s 35 direct participants.
Responding to the news, Alex Reddish, Managing Director at Tribe Payments, said: “The news that another major payment system – the UK’s CHAPS – is out of action emphasises why so many regulators worldwide are pushing ahead with operational resilience frameworks. After the failure of several corporate and retail payment platform outages this year, it’s even more worrying that national payment systems around the world are going down with increasing frequency. Whether it’s because of cyberattacks or the failures of legacy tech to handle increasing complexity remains to be seen.
“Incidents like these illustrate how much we depend on these systems in our daily lives, and how much we rely on the smooth flow of payments no matter which system they pass through. The UK’s forthcoming New Payments Architecture (NPA) will go some way to modernising and improving stability for interbank and retail payments, but it’s been beset by a series of delays and we’re still waiting for an implementation date.
“The core principle of the NPA is to streamline interbank payments into a single settlement system, replacing the numerous systems currently in operation. Until the NPA is ready to go live, today’s news goes to show that the payment industry, regulators, and system operators must move faster to ensure that the current systems handling payments are resilient enough not to be taken down by more incidents.”
The UK’s payments networks have been hit by a number of outages over the past two months.
Towards the end of June, four of the country’s biggest banks – Virgin Money, HSBC, Barclays and Nationwide – were hit by an outage. More recently, card networks went down across a range of British retailers including some prominent supermarkets.
