Red faces after Deutsche glitch

THERE WERE red faces at Deutsche Bank yesterday after a systems failure at its central computer forced it to withdraw from international interbank clearing for much of Wednesday. The failure is understood to have had a serious impact on liquidity in the market for euro payments.

The bank insisted that the fault, now corrected, was not Y2K-related. It said: "Deutsche Bank ... encountered a systems problem in its central production site in Eschborn, Germany. Meanwhile the systems problem was recovered. But Deutsche Bank was unable to participate in the international clearing of interbank payments [on Wednesday]."