Following a live launch at the Bank of England, financial messaging network Swift has released a new business continuity service for operators of national high value payments systems.
The Market Infrastructure Resiliency Service (Mirs) is a backup service for Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems. Mirs provides a third line of support to RTGS operators experiencing problems with first and second line backup systems.
Once active, Mirs provides the essential functions required to achieve final settlement in real-time on a transaction by transaction basis. Upon deployment, RTGS operators remain in full control of the service while Swift manages the technical operations.
Swift has been working with central banks on the development of the system for the past three years. At the end of 2013, the Bank of England completed a pilot and successfully tested Mirs with the Clearing House Automated Payment System (Chaps) community, before moving into live deployment in February.
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."