The Bank of England has appointed Deloitte to conduct a review after a technical glitch in its automated payments system threw thousands of property purchases into turmoil last month.

Home buyers and sellers were left in limbo for most of the day during the ten-hour outage on October 20, unable to complete transactions until the problem with the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system was fixed.

The system is used to transfer hundreds of billions of payments between lenders.

Its failure prompted the Bank and the operators of the Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) to extend opening hours into the evening to ensure they could be processed.

The Bank later said all 142,759 payments submitted to RTGS before its extended deadline on the day had been processed.

Governor Mark Carney said he was launching a thorough, independent review in the wake of the debacle.

Today the Bank announced that it would be conducted by Deloitte and is expected to report early next year. The announcement comes a day ahead of Mr Carney's appearance before the Treasury Select Committee.

The review will look into the causes of the incident and assess the robustness and governance of the system, as well as the effectiveness of the Bank's response and lessons learned.

A glitch occurred after the system was re-started in the early hours of the morning following routine maintenance. It is reported to have followed a new bank being added.

Payments settling balances between commercial banks worth billions of pounds - key to financial stability - were processed manually during the outage.

But house purchase payments using CHAPS were not among them, so homebuyers and sellers were forced to wait until the afternoon for the computers to be up and running again for their purchases or sales to go through.