BNY Mellon suffers payments glitch
BNY Mellon suffers payments glitch
BNY Mellon experienced problems with processing clients’ payments instructions – it blamed the issue on its connection to Swift. The problems were subsequently resolved.
The bank issued a statement last Thursday saying the systems were fully functional and that additional back-up was established to minimise the risks of any disruptions in the future.
However, no details about the cause of the problem were disclosed, beyond the statement that BNY Mellon “became aware of an issue that impacted our ability to send messaging to and from the Swift network”.
This is the second major IT glitch at BNY Mellon in the last 18 months. In late August 2015, the bank’s mutual fund accounting system, FIS/SunGard’s InvestOne, went down. The back-up system was corrupted as well. Subsequently, BNY Mellon agreed to pay $3 million to settle an investigation by the regulators of its problems calculating net asset values on 1,200 mutual funds (as a result of the system’s breakdown).
BNY Mellon processes about 160,000 global payments daily, which amounts to an average of $1.6 trillion. It provides payment services in 100+ currencies through more than 2,000 correspondent banks worldwide.
It is also an early adopter of Swift’s new Global Payments Innovation Initiative (GPII), which is set to go live in early 2017. Around 70 correspondent banks worldwide have signed up for GPII so far, including Bank of China, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank.
Recently, BNY Mellon’s treasury services business has created a global innovation group and appointed Christopher Mager to lead it.
