The European Central Bank will enlist a major auditing firm to investigate the payment and financial trade delays experienced last month, as stated by ECB President Christine Lagarde. 

The ECB's Target payment system encountered a significant outage on February 28, triggered by malfunctioning hardware and exacerbated by an initial, erroneous diagnosis of database issues. 

Lagarde mentioned that the four central banks overseeing Target—Germany, Italy, France, and Spain—are examining why the problem took so long to identify and why backup systems did not activate promptly. 

“The supervisor, which is one of the big auditing firms and which has the duty to do that, is also going to be brought into the investigation,” Lagarde noted during a hearing with European lawmakers. 

While she did not disclose the name of the firm, Deloitte had previously investigated a series of breakdowns in 2020, leading to enhancements in the ECB’s crisis management framework. 

Lagarde described the situation as "an issue of standing and reputation" for the ECB and emphasized the need for complete transparency regarding the issues and the solutions to prevent recurrence.