The 21-year-old RTGS system handles about £500bn of payments between banks every day, facilitating a huge range of transactions — from settling company invoices to house purchases. Mark Carney, governor of the BoE, has said that changes are needed to help RTGS handle new demands as the financial industry evolves. He launched the overhaul three years ago after parts of the payments system suffered an embarrassing nine-hour outage that forced the BoE to start processing important transactions manually.

https://www.ft.com/content/a8d997a0-6605-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614