Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture

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Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture

Summary

The Bank of England has announced it no longer needs Accenture to run its revamped Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) platform, a programme that cost £431 million. Deputy governor Dave Ramsden told MPs the central bank now holds the in-house skills and intellectual property to maintain, fix and enhance RTGS, which handles about £790 billion in transactions every day. Accenture’s final involvement ended on 27 February 2026; the bank says staff were embedded with the supplier throughout development and the bank owns the IP.

The switch to in-house operation has pushed annual operating costs up to around £41 million (from £21 million previously), according to the National Audit Office, largely because running the system was brought inside the Bank. The RTGS platform is cloud-native, replaced a mainframe-based predecessor, and went live in April 2025. The NAO judged the total programme cost — 15% above plan — reasonable given the programme’s size and complexity.

Key Points

  • The Bank of England says it can operate and develop its £431m RTGS platform without Accenture after the supplier’s final exit on 27 Feb 2026.
  • Deputy governor Dave Ramsden and CIO Nathan Monk stressed the bank embedded staff with Accenture during development and now own the system’s intellectual property.
  • RTGS processes about £790bn in daily transactions and moved from mainframe to cloud-native technologies; it went live in April 2025.
  • Annual operating and maintenance costs rose to ~£41m after bringing operations in-house, up from ~£21m when parts were outsourced.
  • The programme finished at £431m — 15% over plan — which the NAO said was still below typical industry cost levels for similar projects.

Context and relevance

This story matters for anyone watching public sector IT, vendor dependence and financial infrastructure resilience. It highlights a trend where government bodies aim to reclaim capability and IP from big consultancies to reduce long-term supplier lock-in and the hidden downstream costs that can follow bespoke contracts. The RTGS case also underscores the trade-offs: higher immediate operating costs versus greater control and in-house expertise.

Why should I read this?

Quick take: if you care about who controls critical financial plumbing (and whether public bodies get left needing a single supplier), this is a neat, real-world example. The Bank says it taught itself to fish — and that has cost and capability consequences you should know about.

Source

Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/bank_of_england_accenture/