A glitch in the European Central Bank’s payment system left several Eurozone commercial and central banks far off target Monday afternoon. It is the latest in a long run of issues plaguing the program.
The Target system, which is supposed to connect commercial and central banks from around the Eurozone and handles more than $2 trillion every day, suffered a malfunction that caused several entities to be separated from their online accounts in the hours leading up to the end of the business day. Those affected, which also included market infrastructure firms, were left unable to monitor transactions and bank balances and were forced to rely on internal bookkeeping processes (they could still settle payments).
This is the latest snafu for a system that suffered so many problems in 2020 that the European Central Bank conducted an independent review and sanctioned an overhaul of its system. There were at least five cases of technical problems, with one seeing payments down for 11 hours. Deloitte conducted an independent review and found six major issues with how the European Central Bank runs the Target system. It cited change management and crisis handling as two specific areas for concern.
An ECB spokesperson told Reuters it is “technically not possible” to say how many users were affected but allowed it was “probably a substantial number”.
The trouble, which compromised Target’s Information and Control Module, began around 14:15 GMT and was resolved just over six hours later, or roughly two and a half hours after close.
The European Central Bank runs Target with help from the German, French, Italian, and Spanish central banks.