Bank of England tells Visa Europe to hire PwC after 2018 outage

LONDON (Reuters) - The Bank of England has told Visa Europe to appoint consultants PwC to ensure that recommendations were fully implemented to avoid a repeat of an outage last year, the bank said on Friday.

Visa Europe suffered partial disruption to its payment card authorisation system in June 2018, affecting 5.2 million transactions in Britain and elsewhere, prompting the company to hire an outside party to carry out an independent review.

"The Bank recognises that Visa Europe has accepted all of the recommendations of the independent review, in full, and is committed to implementing them in a timely manner," the BoE said in a statement.

"As a further action, it is also using its powers to require Visa Europe to appoint an independent third party, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to assess Visa Europe’s progress in implementing these recommendations."

The BoE said that its action does not imply that Visa Europe has broken any rules or that it was being sanctioned. PwC will provide a final report to the BoE later this year.

Visa said it has implemented significant enhancements to its network, operations and crisis-management processes since the service disruption to ensure resilience of its systems and better coordination with clients on behalf of consumers.

(Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Peter Graff and David Goodman)