Bank of England orders Visa to fix outage issues
The Bank of England is taking supervisory action over Visa Europe’s June 2018 outage, which disrupted its card authorisations system.
The Bank of England has required that PwC watches over the implementations
As reported last year, Visa disclosed that this incident affected 5.2 million card transactions, almost half of which were in the UK.
The bank has now decided to use its statutory powers to direct Visa Europe to implement the recommendations of a review that Visa commissioned to an independent party following the incident, with the scope agreed with both the bank and the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR).
It is also using its powers to get Visa Europe to appoint an independent third party, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), to assess the progress in implementing these recommendations.
According to the bank, the incident resulted in widespread disruption to users of Visa Europe’s services and had the potential to affect confidence in the financial system.
The bank considers its action proportionate to the nature and impact of the incident.
The action taken by the bank “does not imply the breach of a regulatory requirement and does not constitute enforcement action”.
PwC will provide a final report to the Bank of England later this year assessing the progress in the implementation of each recommendation.
