SWIFT Launches Business Continuity Service for Payment Systems

The Bank of England completed a pilot and successfully tested the service with the Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) community at the end of last year and went live on the new service in February.
By Janet Du Chenne(59204)
SWIFT has launched a new business continuity service to support global payment systems.

The Market Infrastructure Resiliency Service (MIRS) is a backup service for Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems – electronic platforms used for the continuous settlement of high value and multi-currency cash payments between banks. The Bank of England completed a pilot and successfully tested MIRS with the Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) community at the end of last year and went live on the new service in February.

Central banks and financial market infrastructures operate RTGS systems to ensure effective settlement of high value payment transactions. As a backup platform, MIRS provides a third line of support to RTGS operators experiencing problems with first and second line backup systems.

Since July 2011, SWIFT has been working with a group of central banks, including the Bank of England, to identify the necessary requirements to enable RTGS functions to operate normally in the case of disruptions at their existing sites.

By using MIRS, the Bank of England’s RTGS will continue to operate, even in the event of disruptions at its two existing sites.

Juliette Kennel, head of Market Infrastructures, SWIFT, says: “Given the prominent role that RTGS systems play in the world economy, it is vital to safeguard effectively against operational disruptions and manage related risks. MIRS provides market infrastructures with the necessary tools to maintain business as usual operations even in the very unlikely but high impact event that their first and second lines of defense were to fail.”

Toby Davies, head of Market Services at the Bank of England, says: “With two live operational sites, our current RTGS systems are highly resilient. However, we wanted to establish an additional contingency solution that was both robust and cost effective. MIRS will allow us to continue operating at full business volumes in the unlikely event of an outage affecting both our existing sites simultaneously.”

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