Bank of England: CHAPS Payment System Service Restored After Outage

The Bank of England said Thursday (July 18) that a global payments issue that was affecting CHAPS, the United Kingdom’s high-value payment system, is now resolved.

“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 Bank of England said in a Thursday press release. “We expect that all payments received by the Bank today will be settled by the end of the day.”

The Bank of England had said earlier Thursday, in another press release, that a global payments issue was affecting the CHAPS service and delaying house purchases and other high-value and time-sensitive payments.

The Bank said in that press release that it was working with a third-party supplier, industry and other authorities to resolve the issue. It added that retail payments systems for cash points, card payments and bank transfers were unaffected by the payments issue.

Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources, that the issue was related to Swift.

An operational update posted Thursday by Swift did not mention CHAPS but said that all Swift services were operating as normal after experiencing an operational incident that delayed the processing of services that it provides to some of its customers earlier in the day.

Swift said in the update that the incident was not cyber-related and that its technical teams had restored the affected services.

“We are in contact with our customers to support them in mitigating the adverse consequences on their operations and in turn on their own customers’ transactions,” Swift said in the update. “Swift takes any operational incident extremely seriously, is conducting a full investigation and apologizes for the disruption caused.”

CHAPS processed 4.1 million payments worth 7.3 trillion pounds (about $9.5 trillion) over 20 settlement processing days in the month of June, according to the Bank of England website. Compared to June 2023, the daily volume was up 2.2% and the daily value was up 0.5%.

“Most of CHAPS value (73% in 2021) is in wholesale financial transactions and is therefore largely reflective of financial market conditions,” the site said.