As the last Accenture employee clocked off from supporting the Bank of England's £431 million Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street was assured it would no longer depend on the global consultancy.
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.
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."
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.
For example, in January last year, the UK tax collector awarded Accenture 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."
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.
In 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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