A rare breakdown in service from Swift early on Wednesday morning delayed routine payments, including salaries, for all customers of all banks in New Zealand.Banks used back-up payments channels, through NZ Clear, to process batch payments once the problem became clear at around 2am local time.A statement by Swift late yesterday said the problem lasted more than seven hours.Swift said in the statement that there was "no outage" but rather "reduced performances" of the systems banks use to process bulk payments.Sandra Gavard, head of public relations for Swift in Singapore, said that "a network hardware component been replaced" following the problem.Steve Nichols, chief executive of Payments New Zealand, said most payments were processed by early afternoon.