Reserve Bank To Assess ESAS Outage

Transactions are now flowing through the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s Exchange Settlement Account System (ESAS) after an outage this morning. The Reserve Bank is now looking into the cause of the outage.

ESAS allows individual transactions between financial institutions to be settled electronically as the transactions happen.

The system was offline for approximately three hours which meant that wholesale and retails transactions were unable to be processed between banks. While transactions are now flowing there is a backlog to process.

Christian Hawkesby, Assistant Governor General Manager, Economics, Financial Markets and Banking Group said, “While the system is back online we are continuing to work with ESAS users to keep them updated about the outage. We will also be undertaking an assessment to confirm what caused the outage”.

“We are aware that some retail customers have been impacted by the outage but all transactions should be processed shortly. We will be working with system users to ensure all transactions are processed as soon as possible. We thank everyone for their patience.”

More information:

• ESAS is the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's Exchange Settlement Account System and along with Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) allows individual transactions between financial institutions to be settled electronically as the transactions happen.

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