In wake of IT meltdown at Ulster Bank, Ireland toughens up payment system risk assessment

In the wake of last year's IT meltdown at Ulster Bank, Ireland's payments systems will face more regular risk assessments.

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In wake of IT meltdown at Ulster Bank, Ireland toughens up payment system risk assessment

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Last June, a bungled software update at RBS saw a huge payments backlog develop, causing chaos for Ulster Bank customers, with many not having their accounts rectified for several weeks.

In response, the Central Bank of Ireland told the Irish Payment Services Organisation (Ipso) to bring in an outside firm to carry out a risk assessment of the country's infrastructure.

Now published, the review conducted by BH Consulting concludes that the Ipso's risk management processes are "relatively robust", based on international best practises.

However, given that the payments infrastructure is considered a critical system affecting market, and even societal, stability, several recommendations designed to beef up procedures have been made and accepted.

Risk assessments currently carried out every two years will now be done annually to help ensure they are "in line with the latest threats and risks".

In addition, the Ipso risk framework will be fully aligned with industry best practice and assessments will focus on the payments systems as a whole rather than looking at the individual elements.

Representatives from member banks' operations, IT, and risk functions will also present their assessments to a new payments risk governance board.

Pat McLoughlin, CEO, Ipso, says: "Ipso and its member banks are committed to ensuring we have a robust system of risk assessments to guarantee that customers continue to trust in their payments being made safely, efficiently and quickly."

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Comments: (1)

A Finextra member 

By the way, that 2012 outage with their Batch runs when they had to do a cold start with CA7 and could not restore the CA 7 queues in time ........ The multiple Q's that are essential for restoring and restarting at the point of failure should be keep off the legacy system as a backup incase of catastrophic failure ..... They had no idea of where to begin the multiple Batch cycles, the input Q, the output Q, Execution Q, the Jes Q etc etc .... Keeping track off-line on a separate smart server would of least given them a relative starting position ..... This type of catastrophic failure because of the incompatible formats between the scheduler release may of lead to corruption of the Q's necessitating a cold start ... Do this during a night run of some 90,000 Batch jobs and your in for a monumental task to catch up ..... Just my opinion ....

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