The Reserve Bank's Payments Policy Department has recommended measures to improve the performance of the RITS platform following an outage that paralysed its operation last August.Officials from the payments department have examined the circumstances surrounding the outage and made recommendations on how to hasten recovery times in future outages.Details of the recommendations are contained in the annual assessment of the RITS system published on the RBA website this week.RITS stands for the Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System. It is the system used by banks to settle their payments obligations in real time. The RITS platform went into meltdown on August 30 last year, which resulted in extended delays to the settlement of transactions executed through Austraclear, CHESS and SWIFT.The outage was caused by an external service provider who was conducting routine fire control testing of the RITS data centre. The test triggered an unplanned shutdown of all primary and back-up power supplies supporting the data centre.It took more than five hours for tens of  thousands of delayed transactions to be processed - well outside the two-hour global best practice benchmark for recovery of such settlement infrastructure.The Payments Department has called for the RBA to implement technical changes and run further testing of the RITS data centre to ensure it is able to recover functionality more swiftly in the future.The RITS system is programmed to automatically transfer control to a duplicate system at a back-up site in the event of power failures or operational breakdowns.Such capability is known as "automatic failover" in IT jargon.However, the automatic transfer to the offsite system misfired during the August 2018 event which meant that recovery of the RITS platform required manual intervention and took longer than expected.The software that drives the RITS data centre was reprogrammed recently to strengthen the system's automatic failover capability.The RBA and other central banks are under pressure to overhaul their high value settlement architectures to be compliant the new ISO 20022 standard by 2025.RITS and equivalent high value messaging systems operated by central banks in other countries presently comply with ISO 3583 - a standard developed in the 1970s.In 2025 messaging currently used under the 3583 standard will no longer be accepted by SWIFT - the global secure messaging service provider.In the RITS report released on Tuesday, the RBA said it was targeting migration to the new standard by the end of 2024.In February the Bank of England advertised for IT providers to bid for a 150 million pound sterling contract aimed at bringing its systems in to line with the new standard by 2025.