London July 18 2024: The Bank of England said on Thursday it had suffered a temporary outage to its CHAPS interbank payment system, which handles more than 360 billion pounds ($467 billion) on an average day, but expected all payments to be settled by the end of the day.
“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 BoE said in a statement.
Most Britons only come across CHAPS when making a high-value transaction like a house purchase, but it accounts for more than 90% of total sterling payments by value as banks use it to settle sterling money market and foreign exchange transactions.
Retail payment systems, including debit cards and cash machines, had been unaffected, the BoE said.
The CHAPS system has suffered technical problems before, including in August last year and in 2014 when the BoE’s Real-Time Gross Settlement system, which underpins CHAPS, did not work normally for several hours.
CHAPS also relies on the SWIFT messaging network, which provides secure international communication between banks.
All major British banks and the London branches of major global banks are direct participants in CHAPS.
