Daily News at Sibos

• David Bannister
• 7 September, 2011

A Market Infrastructure Resiliency Service is being developed by Swift to keep key functions at Real Time Gross Settlement systems around the world operating in the event of a major outage. The MIRS service specifications have been agreed in collaboration with a number of central banks and development is under way, says Swift, to keep the payments operations of RTGS’ intact with a project end date of Q4 2013 envisaged. The Bank of England will participate in a MIRS pilot to aid development and the organisation is hoping others will come on board later on.

 MIRS is a shared service that will technically be operated and hosted by Swift, while the central banks will handle the business management of the service from a Crisis Command Centre connected to Swift. The separate MIRS generic payment settlement system will:

 • Establish accurate starting liquidity positions at the time of failure, including the outstanding unprocessed payments held in Swift message queues

 • Maintain the account structure and enable transfers across the books of the central bank

 • Settle inter-bank payments and net settlements initiated by banks or ancillary systems

• Provide a user interface to give the RTGS operator and participating banks monitoring and control functionality

• Provide the essential credit controls to prevent settlement banks going overdrawn at the central bank.According to Swift, MIRS will protect against a large-scale failure, even in the extreme scenario of a catastrophic loss of all production sites, at an acceptable cost. Minimal impact will be felt on existing RTGS systems around the world, it also maintains. 

Explaining the Bank of England’s rationale for working with Swift on the development of MIRS, Toby Davies, head of the market services division at BoE said: “With twin operational sites our current operation of RTGS – the UK’s interbank high value payment system – is highly resilient, but we have been looking for a strong and cost effective contingency solution in the improbable event of catastrophic failure. In this unlikely scenario, MIRS would enable CHAPS and other payments activity to continue to settle in central bank money throughout the business day. We are pleased to be participating in the pilot.” 

Commenting on the development, Alain Raes, chief executive, EMEA, Swift, said: “MIRS will make a vital contribution to the safety of critical payments market infrastructures, and I believe we are perfectly positioned to help our customers benefit from highly resilient business continuity services, at a reasonable cost, thanks to our existing footprint in the payments world. We are delighted to be working with the Bank of England to build a solution that caters for the interests of a whole community as we deliver on our key strategic thrust to expand our services for RTGS systems by leveraging our core competences.”