ACCENTURE TO PLAY IMPORTANT ROLE IN BANK OF ENGLAND; EMPLOYEES TO FOCUS ON 5 BROAD GOALS: REPORT!  

The Bank of England has hired IT consulting company Accenture to overhaul part of Britain’s payments infrastructure. It is a contract worth up to 150 million pounds ($195 million). The project, will see the replacement of the core system it uses to settle payments between banks, which is a critical part of the UK’s payments infrastructure. 

“The Renewal Programme is a key priority not just for the Bank but also the wider UK payments industry. It will support a resilient financial system that protects the UK’s financial and monetary stability in the years to come," said Victoria Cleland, the BoE’s executive director for banking, payments and innovation.

As per Reuters report, the project to overhaul RTGS, which currently handles 685 billion pounds a day in payments between large financial institutions, is due to start being delivered in 2022.

Also, the initial research phase of the replacement project established five broad goals which are:

- higher resilience

- broader access

- wider interoperability

- improved user functionality

- strengthened end-to-end risk management.

In 2017 May, the bank came up with a blueprint that set out the main goals of the new RTGS system. They also  published a contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union in February 2019, at that time, the contract was worth a maximum of £150m, including technology and support.

While speaking to Computer Weekly last year, Victoria Cleland, executive director of banking, payments and innovation at the Bank of England, said: “I expect a big bang cutover because what you have with RTGS is the core ledger supporting payment transactions worth hundreds of billions of pounds a day, and we can’t have some members on it while others are not.”

Meanwhile, the bank also wants to utilise modern IT, increase the number of companies that connect directly to the system and make it available 24 hours a day. 

“It gets to the point where if you were to make fundamental changes, such as making it available 24/7 and increasing capacity, it is better to start from scratch,” said Cleland.

However, Sulabh Agarwal, a managing director at Accenture who leads its global payments practice, said the project is one of the most important initiatives for the UK payments system.

"The rise of digital and instant payments in recent years has dramatically changed the way we pay, reflecting changes in the needs of households and companies. The renewed system will enable financial institutions to access a more modern and secure payments platform which is fit for the future," he said.