ECB to bring in auditor to investigate Feb 28 payment outage

FRANKFURT (Reuters) -The European Central Bank will bring in a major auditing firm to investigate an outage that hit its payment system last month and caused delays in payments and financial trades for thousands of people, ECB President Christine Lagarde said on Thursday.

The ECB's Target payment system suffered a significant outage on February 28, caused by a piece of malfunctioning hardware and made worse by an initial, mistaken diagnosis of database issues.

Lagarde said the four central banks that run Target -- those of Germany, Italy, France and Spain -- are looking into why it took so long to identify the problem and why back-up systems did not immediately kick in.

"The supervisor, which is one of the big auditing firms and which has the duty to do that, is also going to be brought into the investigation," Lagarde told European lawmakers during a hearing.

She did not name the firm. Deloitte carried out a previous probe into a string of breakdowns in 2020, following which the ECB overhauled Target and in particular its crisis management framework.

Lagarde called the matter "an issue of standing and reputation" for the ECB.

"We need to be totally transparent as to what it is and how we fix it so it doesn't happen again," she said.

(Reporting by Francesco Canepa, Editing by Louise Heavens and Hugh Lawson)