House purchases have been delayed by a glitch with a global payment system that left banks unable to transfer large sums of money.
The Bank of England said on Thursday it had suffered a temporary outage to its CHAPS interbank payment system, which handles more than £360bn on an average day.
The Clearing House Automated Payment System – CHAPS – is used for processing large payments, typically the completion of home sales but also more exotic transactions such as football player purchases or art deals.
Banks also use it to send money between each other when settling foreign exchange transactions or other deals. While the public typically does not deal with CHAPS, payments over the network account for 90pc by value of all sterling transfers each day.
The Bank of England warned that issues with the system on Thursday had delayed some home purchases, without providing numbers.
A spokesman said: “A global payments issue is affecting the Bank’s CHAPS service and delaying some high value and time-sensitive payments, including some house purchases.”
Brokers warned that homebuyers faced a potential “nightmare scenario”. Hannah Bashford, director of Model Financial Solutions, said anyone looking to complete home purchases “may be left high and dry with nowhere to move to if funds aren’t passed through the system in time to complete”.
The CHAPS outage was understood to be related to Swift, a messaging platform used by financial companies around the world to communicate with each other. Banks use the network to tell each other how much to send and to what accounts.
A source close to Swift said the payments outage was not the result of a cyber attack and the issue was resolved by mid-afternoon.
This is the third time since 2014 that the Bank of England has reported an issue with the service. It last went down in August last year.
A Bank of England spokesman said: “We are pleased to confirm that the third party supplier has restored service following their earlier issues, and CHAPS payments are settling as normal.”
A spokesman for Swift said: “Swift takes any operational incident extremely seriously, is conducting a full investigation and apologises for the disruption caused.”
Tony Craddock, director general of The Payments Association, which represents companies in the sector, said: “Thankfully problems like today’s are extremely rare. We understand the public’s frustration.”
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