The Bank of England has appointed Deloitte as the auditor to probe systems outage that broke down Clearing House Automated Payments System (CHAPS) for 10 hours in October.
On 20 October, a glitch generated during routine maintenance hit the Bank of England’s Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS), which further thwarted payments processing from 6am until around 4pm.
Claimed to be the biggest in the system’s history, the 10-hour outage is believed to have been due to the addition of a new institution to the system, leading to delay in several house purchases and home moves.
The Bank said in a statement: "The Court of the Bank of England has appointed Deloitte to conduct the review and has set out the terms of reference they will follow.
"The review will investigate the causes of the incident, the effectiveness of the Bank’s response and provide lessons learned from the incident."
As part of the review, Deloitte will conduct a root cause analysis; evaluate the robustness of the system; review the governance of the system; in addition to assessing the bank’s response on the day; and evaluate the effectiveness ofincident management and back-up plans.
Further, the consequences of the probe, including additional remarks made by the Bank of England concerning the rulings, will be offered at the court of the Bank of England by early 2015.
