Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture
- Reference: 1772543677
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/03/03/bank_of_england_accenture/
- Source link:
Probed by MPs this week, deputy governor Dave Ramsden said he was confident the UK's central bank had the in-house skills and intellectual property to run RTGS, which it started planning in 2016.
Members of the House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee, a spending watchdog, were concerned the Bank of England might end up having to pay to support the bespoke software, which manages £790 billion in transactions every day.
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Committee member Rupert Lowe said: "In my experience, when you get involved in writing bespoke software, particularly with people like Accenture, if you're not careful, you end up running up a very big downstream bill."
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Ramsden said: "It was a key part of the contract with Accenture that they would pass everything back to us to run, so we are not contracting out. In fact, Friday (February 27) was the last involvement of Accenture."
Some government departments have become dependent on expertise from suppliers such that they have to extend contracts without competition, partly through a lack of internal knowledge.
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For example, in January last year, the UK tax collector awarded Accenture [5]an additional £35.2 million without competition to run the National Insurance and PAYE System (NPS) because only Accenture could manage the technical risk, age, and intricate interdependencies of the solution, a public notice said.
Ramsden said the Bank of England was now able to manage any issues with RTGS, as well as develop new features on the system:
"We have technology experts who, [when we] have one of these instances, we'll get to what's happened. We'll be able to work it out from the code. We can fix it. On the innovation agenda, these are the people who are going to be enhancing the system."
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Nathan Monk, the Bank of England's chief information officer, told the committee Accenture and Bank of England staff had co-located from the beginning of the contract, while bank technical staff were placed in Accenture teams during the development of the RTGS. The bank also owns the intellectual property for the system.
"It has been a conscious decision. We embedded people in the Accenture team real early on, and we've grown that capability throughout the time as well," he said.
[7]Bank of England: Financial sector failing to implement basic cybersecurity controls
[8]Bank of England's Oracle cloud migration bill triples as project grinds on
[9]Delay to European Central Bank messaging project cost the Bank of England £23M
[10]Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth
In [11]a report last year , the National Audit Office (NAO) pointed out that the annual operating and maintenance costs for the RTGS had increased to around £41 million, compared with £21 million previously.
Ramsden said that was because the cost of running the system had come in-house, along with the technical expertise.
The Bank of England is a public body funded through fees for regulating financial institutions, income from banking services and banknote issuance, management fees charged to government agencies, and returns on investments built up over more than 300 years. It generates more income than it spends and contributes millions of pounds to the UK Treasury.
In 2020, the bank contracted Accenture as its technical delivery partner. The previous RTGS relied on mainframe technology and was difficult to maintain because of its specialist hardware and a shortage of skills. The new platform is still internally hosted, but relies on "cloud-native" technologies, making it more flexible. It went live in April 2025.
The NAO pointed out that the overall cost of the RTGS program was £431 million, 15 percent above what was planned and more than the original 11 percent risk contingency. Still, the costs remained lower than the industry standard for similar projects, the NAO said.
"The increase in cost was reasonable given the size and complexity of the program, and the number of uncertainties and risks that the bank had to manage," the auditors said. ®
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/03/accenture_wins_35_million_more
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/financial_sector_cyber_gap/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/09/bank_of_england_oracle/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/ecb_messaging_project/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/bank_of_england_says_jlrs/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/ecb_messaging_project/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Don't make it, buy it in
My ex-father-in-law was a life-long Morgan car owner, and happened to be in the Malvern workshop speccing up his next car when Sir John made his infamous visit. He was utterly appalled by how these hand built cars were pushed by hand between workshops, how the panels were beaten by hand to an ash chassis.
Craftsmanship was anathema to Sir John...
NAO happy or unhappy?
It's not clear from the article if the overall NAO position on this is positive or negative.
But, from my armchair POV, it looks like the BoE has done far better than just about any other government project. A modest cost overrun (not the usual orders of magnitude increases), and they aren't beholden to external rip-off merchants for ongoing maintenance and support.
I wonder how the ~£40m annual running cost compares against the previous incarnation of the project.
Imagine
Imagine if public sector learned how to cook steaks and that "cheap" wine is not really that different from the expensive ones.
Re: Imagine
"magine if public sector learned how to cook steaks"
Unlikely, given the negative ESG scores and ESG awards that they (i.e., we as tax payers) pay for.
I thought we'd seen the end of consultancy cash cows
My first experience of the consultancy cash cow was at Barclays in Knutsford in 1991 when I worked for a well-known PC manufacturer. Arthur Andersen, who renamed themselves to Accenture after their involvement in the Enron scandal, were firmly embedded..
It was a large distributed software project, with a corresponding rollout of PCs to every branch.
The fax machines were running throughout the day with CVs from Andersen's Androids as they were known. These were almost all wet behind the ears graduates who'd had their 6 weeks of indoctrination at the Chicago HQ. Pretty much every project role at Barclays was up for grabs, with the going rate for a photocopying operative being £750/day. There were hundreds of them.
Why? Thanks to intransigent and difficult unions, together with an arrogant and belligerent CTO (Joseph de Feo), consultancies were routinely leveraged to get projects done.
There used to be an unofficial usefulness quotient placed on the Androids. I'd say only about 10% were adding real value to Barclays, with the remaining 90% essentially doing work experience, and 100% of them adding value to the Arthur Andersen partners' back pockets. Joseph de Feo probably enjoyed some great corporate hospitality out of it too.
Since that time, I've always been wary of consultancies, and have regularly seen the same old rinse and repeat in small, medium, and large projects, in both public and private sectors, although never quite as bad as the aforementioned Barclays experience.
I thought we were over greedy consultancy pillagers about ten or fifteen years ago. I guess I was wrong.
Re: I thought we'd seen the end of consultancy cash cows
It swings between hiring in-house to control things and outsourcing to save employee costs. Depends on who is deciding on a given day.
Re: I thought we'd seen the end of consultancy cash cows
I've heard the advice I gave didn't work out so well but the house that I bought giving it has been quite lovely.
Don't make it, buy it in
>> Some government departments have become dependent on expertise from suppliers such that they have to extend contracts without competition, partly through a lack of internal knowledge.
This was the Tory mantra. Their hero was John Harvey-Jones. Become a buyer of services rather than have any real knowledge. It was state sponsored dumbing down of business intellect.