ECB Fixes Weak Protocols Following Target2 Outage in 2020

The news site Finextra Research reports that during a review of an extended Target2 outage last year, Deloitte identified Crisis Management as a key failure in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) recovery efforts. Target2 is a deposit facility at the ECB, and when it went down, its backup site failed to boot up, leaving central banks and financial institutions across the Eurozone unable to transfer liquidity, process transactions or settle securities transactions. ECB data shows that this resulted in a €416 billion drop in the use of Target2. 

The ECB hired Deloitte to conduct an independent review after the blackout – one in five major IT incidents in 2020 which affected monetary transactions and securities processing across banks in the Eurozone. The consultants found weaknesses including business continuity management and communications protocols during crises. As a result, the ECB have said, “Measures addressing several recommendations have already been agreed or implemented. For example, in 2020 the Eurosystem decided to establish a more comprehensive second line of defence for all the Target Services, which has already been partially implemented, and which will be fully operational by the end of 2021.”

Read the article ECB told to fix crisis management, comms and disaster recovery after Target2 outage at Finextra Research