Bank of England, the central bank of the U.K., has exercised its statutory authority to direct Visa Europe to fully implement changes recommended in an independent review that followed a massive payments outage in June 2018. 

The report, issued in November, found that Visa Europe was not sufficiently prepared to manage such a disruption and needed to take proactive steps to deal with crisis management, communication and other technical areas.

Visa Europe will be required to appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers to assess its progress in implementing changes recommended in the report. 

Visa Europe undertook the review in conjunction with the bank and the U.K. Payment Systems Regulator. The June 1 outage, caused by what Visa said was a hardware failure, left U.K. customers unable to complete approximately 5 million debit and credit transactions. 

"Visa's mission is to connect the world through a reliable and safe payments system," a spokesman for the company said via email. "We take our role in supporting U.K. and global commerce seriously and that begins with our commitment to protect consumers, businesses and local economies. 

"Since the service disruption in June 2018 we have implemented significant enhancements to our network operations, and crisis management processes to ensure resilience of our systems and better coordination with our clients on behalf of our customers."