RBA reveals three-year project to upgrade payment IT systems

The Reserve Bank of Australia will soon begin up to three years of IT work to improve the resilience of its settlement system following a high-profile outage in late 2022.

It will also replace and decommission its current head office data centre, which had previously been identified as a resilience risk [pdf] due to other upgrade works at the office site.

POP team tackles Deloitte review

The central bank revealed in a tender that it has established two project teams to implement the findings of a Deloitte review into its payment infrastructure, specifically the Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System (RITS), described as "Australia's high-value settlement system".

The RITS, among other functions, settles transactions submitted by the New Payments Platform (NPP).

Hundreds of thousands of real-time payments were delayed by up to five days in October 2022 when a software update to a virtual server provisioning system did not go as planned.

The tender reveals the RBA will tackle the Deloitte review findings in two streams - one around risk, culture and governance; and a second stream more focused on IT.

The IT stream will run under the name ‘Payments Operations Program’ or POP.

“The POP is responsible for IT and business focussed recommendations set out in the Deloitte and external consulting firm reports (e.g. IT controls framework, a software defined lifecycle approach to managing infrastructure changes, knowledge management and staff onboarding),” the bank said.

“The Payments Operations Program will commence activities in early 2024.”

The bank said that planning is anticipated to be completed “by April 2024”, after which there would be two phases of work - “design/build and implementation”. 

IT work under POP is “expected to take two-to-three years to complete (including the planning phase),” the RBA said.

New data centre planned

The tender also reveals that a core infrastructure modernisation or CIM program is set to run in a similar timeframe.

“The CIM program establishes a new co-location data centre, designs and deploys new core infrastructure to all of the bank’s data centres, migrates the bank’s application workloads to the new core infrastructure (both within data centres and between data centres) and decommissions the HO [head office] data centre,” it said.

“The timeline for the CIM Program addresses and accommodates the key dependencies associated with end-of-life issues with the current core infrastructure, and the head office 65 Martin Place (65MP) workplace construction program. 

“The timeline for this project is reasonably tight.”

RBA said that CIM works are already underway and are “expected to take until mid-late 2027 to complete.”

The tender is for a third-party to provide quality assurance services to both programs of work.