Yesterday, it was reported that CHAPS, or the Clearing House Automated Payment System, the system that enables real-time gross settlement payments in the United Kingdom, had gone offline, impacting some “high-value” payments and transfers. The Bank of Engaland did not reveal the cause of the outage, but this type of failure highlights the dependency of financial systems on various systems and technology. Today, an update distributed by Crowdstrike has impacted global travel as well as some financial services firms.
CI has received a comment from Alex Reddish, Managing Director of Tribe Payments, stating that the problem is acute.
“The news that another major payment system – the UK’s CHAPS – [was] 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.”
Reddish said the UK’s forthcoming New Payments Architecture (NPA) will help to modernise and improve the stability for interbank and retail payments.
“[But NPA has] 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.”
Faster is better. As long as it works … 24/7/365.
