RBI asks Refinitiv to explain outage of forex trade platform today

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) sought an explanation from the Refinitiv FX trading platform following an outage that impacted trading in the forex market around Friday noon, November 10.

The outage in Refinitiv lasted for around 13 minutes, due to which players were not able to log into the system, and led to some panic, pulling the Indian rupee to 83.50 against the US dollar, said dealers. The INR settled at 83.34 against the greenback in Friday’s session.

A source said the RBI has asked the platform to undertake a "root cause analysis" and "ascertain whether it was a system failure or human error that led to the disruption" on the platform.

The RBI has also sought an explanation from the platform to understand the circumstances leading up to the disruption and if the standard operating procedures for business continuity were triggered immediately or not, the source said.

The Indian rupee touched a fresh all-time low against the US dollar on Friday, November 10, even as it was expected to strengthen amid the fall in crude prices. The Indian currency slipped below the prevailing low of 83.30 against the dollar and touched an all-time low of 83.36 per dollar as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stayed away from intervention.

Part of the London Stock Exchange Group, Refinitiv India Transaction Services Pvt. Ltd has been authorised by the RBI to operate an electronic trading platform for transactions in the spot forex market. It is one of the five entities, other than banks to operate ETP in the forex space.