Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system and CHAPS Annual Report 2024/25

Foreword

Payments are the lifeblood of the economy, and crucial to all businesses and consumers. Delivery of the RTGS and CHAPS services supports the Bank’s mission to promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom by maintaining monetary and financial stability. RTGS ultimately lies at the heart of every electronic payment in the UK and settles over £800 billion on an average working day.

In April 2025, we completed a multi-year programme to renew RTGS. The first major milestone was the move to ISO 20022 messaging for CHAPS in June 2023, and this April we moved to a new core ledger and settlement engine. Together they have created RT2: a resilient platform for central bank money settlement, enabling growth and innovation. I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the programme from inputting to consultations and co-creation discussions to delivering your own programmes and changing processes to be ready for RT2. It has been a great example of collaboration: I would encourage industry to use and benefit from all the new functionality.

RT2 provides a strong foundation for further change and innovation and working with the RTGS/CHAPS Board we have developed a new strategy to enable us to build on this. Earlier this year, we agreed new strategic themes – resilient and responsive – supported by five strategic outcomes which represent actionable goals in areas where we believe a step change is required to continue to develop our services.

RT2 has stronger end-to-end resilience, including increased security and recovery capabilities. And teams continue to focus on operating the system to the highest standards and have well-rehearsed business continuity plans if incidents do occur.

We will continue to enhance RT2 through a series of small and medium changes focused to enhance our current services as well as bigger, strategic enhancements as part of our Future Roadmap for RTGS to respond to the changing needs of the payments industry.

We are already making strong progress across three priority features of our Future Roadmap: extended settlement hours for RTGS/CHAPS; synchronisation of transfers in RTGS with settlements in other ledgers; and continuing to develop the resilience of RTGS. We continue to work closely with industry, and we believe that these changes are key to facilitating innovation in wholesale payments and support enhanced cross-border payments.

This Annual Report is an important part of our wider commitment to transparency and accountability around the RT2 and CHAPS service. I would encourage people to also read some of the speeches referred to in the annex as they provide greater context to our overall ambition in this area and the importance we place on safe innovation in the payments landscape.

Victoria Cleland
Executive Director, Payments and Chief Cashier
Executive Chair of RTGS/CHAPS Board

1: Introduction to the RTGS and CHAPS services

Why are RTGS and CHAPS important?

The Bank of England’s mission is to promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom by maintaining monetary and financial stability. The provision of RTGS and CHAPS services directly supports our mission in three ways:

• By offering settlement accounts to eligible institutions, RTGS plays a vital role in the functioning of the UK economy through supporting safe and efficient settlement of obligations in central bank money across a wide range of payment systems including several retail payment systems on a net basis.
• CHAPS provides a safe and efficient system for individual high value, and often time-critical, payments to settle. The Bank also reviews the end-to-end risk management for CHAPS with the objective of reducing risks to financial stability.
• Reserves held in reserves accounts in RTGS – under the Bank’s Sterling Monetary Framework – are remunerated at Bank Rate. RTGS therefore acts as the platform through which monetary policy decisions are implemented.

Further information on RTGS and CHAPS can be found on the Bank’s website, including A brief introduction to RTGS and CHAPS.

Governance

RTGS/CHAPS Board and RTGS Renewal Governance

The RTGS/CHAPS Board’s primary role is to set the Bank’s strategy for operation of RTGS and CHAPS services and oversee the management of RTGS and CHAPS in pursuit of the Bank’s mission. It is also accountable for the end-to-end risk management of the CHAPS system. The RTGS/CHAPS Board’s full responsibilities, including those of the Board Risk Committee, are published on the Bank’s website.

The RTGS/CHAPS Board is comprised of a mix of Bank executives and independent members, one of which is appointed as the senior independent member. Following changes in membership over the last year, independent members now constitute half of the Board. An independent member also chairs the Board Risk Committee. In May 2025, Victoria Cleland, the Bank’s Executive Director for Payments replaced Dave Ramsden, the Bank’s Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking, as the chair of the RTGS/CHAPS Board. The RTGS/CHAPS Board’s membership is published on the Bank’s website.

The RTGS/CHAPS Board operates within the Bank’s wider governance structure, reporting to the Governor and the Bank’s Court of Directors. To ensure the effective governance of the RTGS and CHAPS services, reviews of the Board’s effectiveness are undertaken and identified improvements are implemented.

Following the successful go-live of the renewed RTGS service, RT2, on 28 April 2025, the Renewal Programme has been closed. Our Renewal Executive Board, which oversaw delivery of the Renewal Programme, is being replaced by a new executive group with responsibility for reviewing the RTGS/CHAPS operating and investment budgets as well as overseeing large investment projects under the Future Roadmap for RTGS.

Strategy setting

Following the successful launch of RT2, the RTGS/CHAPS Board agreed a new multi-year strategy for RTGS and CHAPS, centred around our vision of an open, resilient and widely used platform for central bank money settlement, enabling growth and innovation. Our strategy sets the direction of the RTGS/CHAPS services in the medium term.

We have introduced a new vision, mission, strategic themes and strategic outcomes, which will inform and drive the activities that we carry out, informed by our new enhanced horizon scanning approach. For further information on the strategy, refer to Box A: Our strategy for the RTGS and CHAPS services.

Transparency

We are committed to providing users and the wider public with an appropriate level of information of how we operate, and develop, RTGS and CHAPS services. We provide this through several routes including: this Annual Report; publication of our self-assessment of RTGS and CHAPS against the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures; making our ISAE 3402 audit available securely to our users; publication of the tariffs for RTGS/CHAPS as well as the provision of more detailed costing information to fee-payers; and publishing other updates, including discussion papers (DPs) and consultation papers (CPs).

We seek input from our users and the wider public through a range of mechanisms such as surveys, working groups and forums, industry discussion and CPs.

We also publish a guide to RTGS and CHAPS that contains some key figures and metrics, as well as data on operational availability and the volumes and values processed through RTGS and CHAPS on the Bank website.

Risk management

A Bank-wide risk management framework is complemented by a local framework specific to RTGS and CHAPS based on a traditional three-lines-of-defence model. The RTGS/CHAPS Board Risk Committee is responsible for a range of matters relating to risk management including: reviewing and monitoring of the RTGS/CHAPS risk management framework; and monitoring RTGS/CHAPS risk profiles against the RTGS/CHAPS risk and impact tolerances.

We have identified three risk domains: internal; third-party service providers; and service users. Together these define the scope of risk that we manage for the RTGS and CHAPS services. The Bank seeks to mitigate risks in line with a low risk tolerance – very low for operational risk to RTGS and CHAPS – and maintains a robust control environment and risk culture that supports this.

Further information covering our approach for managing risks associated with the RTGS and CHAPS services is set out in our regular self-assessment against the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures.

End-to-end risk management for the CHAPS payment system

As the end-to-end risk manager for the CHAPS system, we seek to ensure that the end-to-end flow of CHAPS payments is safe, secure and stable. Weaknesses in security or operations at any point in the payment chain could threaten stability and trust in the whole system. It is therefore vital to have a holistic view of CHAPS as a network – spanning the Bank’s own RTGS infrastructure in addition to that operated by CHAPS Direct Participants – through which financial or operational risk can be transmitted. To support this, we can draw on the tools and resources available to the Bank to assess and manage end-to-end risks.

The Bank does not directly manage all risks across the end-to-end CHAPS system. Our approach is for risks to be managed where this can be done most effectively. We therefore co-ordinate with others (including CHAPS Direct Participants and critical service providers such as Swift) to seek assurance that the CHAPS payment system, taken as a whole, is operating within our risk tolerance.

The CHAPS Reference Manual sets out the rules that CHAPS Direct Participants must meet. The Bank undertakes assurance of CHAPS Direct Participants against these rules before permitting access to CHAPS and on an ongoing basis.

2: Resilient

Our resilient strategic theme is centred on delivering secure, reliable services, continuous system improvement, and fostering a strong, inclusive culture.

Enhancing risk management

Given the criticality of RTGS and CHAPS to financial stability and the complexity of the operating environment, we need to continually enhance our risk management approach. Recent activities have included:

• The completion of an internal audit review into the effectiveness of risk management in the first and second lines of defence, and subsequent enhancements to our risk management framework and underlying policies.
• The implementation of a ‘hub and spoke’ model, to ensure that risk management expertise is more fully embedded within the key operational teams.
• Continued evolution of our third-party risk management approach and capabilities. We are commissioning an external review into the effectiveness of our third-party risk management approach, reflecting the reliance on a greater number of third-parties introduced through the implementation of RT2.

Operational resilience

Strong operational resilience of RTGS and CHAPS is important to help avoid or manage major operational disruption, which could impact financial stability. As such, further enhancing the operational resilience of the RTGS and CHAPS services is one of our key priorities.

Enhancing frameworks for operational resilience and exercising

The important business services we have identified, and their associated impact tolerances sit at the centre of our operational resilience framework (refer to Box C: Important business services). We review the framework annually, in line with best practice, and identify areas where we can continue to enhance it. Key areas of focus over the past year have been:

• Asset mapping: We updated our asset maps to reflect the new RT2 operating environment and are looking at improving our tooling in this area.
• Scenario testing: We continue to refine our scenario testing programme, integrating it with other testing activity (including regular scripted testing). As part of this we are looking to develop our MIRS (Market Infrastructure Resiliency Service, provided by SWIFT) live testing, to cover more of a live operational day, and we engage with a wide range of industry activities to exercise resilience. In the past year, the latter included participation in SIMEX24, a sector wider simulation exercise based on a national power outage.

Cyber

In an increasingly complex and fast-moving cyber threat landscape, we remain committed to strengthening the cyber resilience of the RTGS and CHAPS services. Our focus is ensuring we can anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber incidents while maintaining the integrity and availability of its critical services.

A cornerstone of the Bank’s cyber resilience efforts has been the delivery of RTGS Renewal Programme, which significantly uplifted our security capabilities.

• RT2 now operates within a dedicated secure zone, significantly strengthening perimeter defences.
• The renewed infrastructure features a modular architecture that enables faster system recovery, along with dual-site operations that enhance service continuity.
• A trusted independent source of data has been introduced to provide robust protection against severe data loss or integrity breaches.

Together, these upgrades position RTGS to meet future challenges by delivering a robust, secure and modernised platform. The Bank-wide cyber defence strategy is built on a multi-layered approach, supported by a strong internal security culture and a three lines of defence model. Regular testing of incident response, containment, and recovery capabilities ensures we remain prepared for a wide range of scenarios. Our cyber security strategy outlines a clear roadmap for maintaining a sustainable and resilient capability, aligned with the evolving threat landscape and technological advancements.

External validation is a key component of the Bank’s assurance framework. RTGS undergoes regular penetration testing and our RTGS and CHAPS services are subject to a range of assessments (refer to Box B: Assurance). Our RTGS operations are ISO 27001 certified, reflecting our commitment to international best practices in information security.

Collaboration with external partners is central to our approach. The Bank maintains strong relationships with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and other government and industry bodies, enabling timely intelligence sharing and co-ordinated responses to emerging threats.

Emerging risk

Emerging risk analysis is critical in an era of rapid technological and geopolitical change. By their nature, emerging risks can be hard to define precisely and the boundaries between different emerging risks can sometimes be unclear. We have continued to work on the emerging risk landscape, focussing on the risks that could have a material impact. Our approach includes internal experts, external engagement and alignment with our work on horizon scanning.

Assurance over RTGS participants

As the operator of CHAPS, a systemically important payment system, we are responsible for setting rules and standards for CHAPS Direct Participants – as well as seeking assurance over their compliance with those rules and standards. This serves to mitigate against the financial and operational risks that might impact the smooth flow of CHAPS payments.

In 2025, we introduced RTGS rules which consolidated and enhanced our existing expectations of RTGS participants in one place, alongside the actions we may take if we have concerns regarding an RTGS participant. These updates also provide us with a basis for future expansion of participant assurance where we consider this necessary.

Our assurance approach must be proportionate, accommodate a diversity of scale and business model, and be responsive to key risks. To support these objectives, we have updated the categorisation model for CHAPS Direct Participants, including revisiting which requirements apply to which category. This drives a proportionate approach to the rules and supporting assurance for different CHAPS Direct Participants, with our biggest focus on those that are systemically important.

We are in the early stages of building frameworks and procedures to enable assurance over other types of RTGS participants, linked to our February 2024 DP on Reviewing access to RTGS accounts for settlement.

Access

We continue to refine the contractual, policy, operational and assurance arrangements for RTGS and CHAPS. Our aim is that they continue to promote efficiency, innovation, and competition in the changing payments landscape without impairing monetary and financial stability.

Onboarding

One of the objectives of the RTGS Renewal Programme was to increase the number of users of RTGS in the future. Wider access to settlement in central bank money helps to promote competition and innovation in payment services. To help facilitate this, onboarding in RT2 is technically simpler and benefits from increased automation which will allow new users to join the system more frequently and more quickly. CHAPS Direct Participants can now also use a test simulator to support testing, simplifying the process.

There are now more than 70 organisations using RTGS to settle directly in one or more payment systems. Following a series of change freezes while we safely delivered the RTGS Renewal Programme, we expect to complete a number of new onboardings for reserves accounts and settlement in the retail systems before the end of 2025. For CHAPS, the first new onboardings post Transition State 3 (TS3) will be in early 2026.

Further access enhancements

In February 2024, we published a DP on reviewing RTGS access policies. Three factors motivated the review: promoting greater access to central bank money settlement to support monetary and financial stability in a changing payments landscape; using the increased capacity and functionality in the renewed RTGS service; and to fulfil the Bank’s commitment under the G20 roadmap to enhance cross-border payments. Feedback on our DP confirmed that we have a positive story to tell overall on RTGS access policies, reflecting our sustained efforts over the past decade. We published our response in April 2025.

On the four areas for potential enhancement:

• Work has now been completed to strengthen the assessment and ongoing assurance processes for non-bank payment service providers seeking access to RTGS. We updated our guide for non-bank payment service providers seeking access to RTGS.
• We are enhancing information we provide to help industry, including foreign banks, to better understand the benefits and costs for RTGS access to encourage greater participation and to enhance the settlement of cross-border payments.
• We have introduced a new assurance regime for financial market infrastructures (FMIs) that settle in RTGS and a discretionary mobilisation phase to make it easier for start-up or less mature FMIs to benefit from the advantages of settlement in central bank money without compromising our risk requirements. Information about these is in our updated RTGS access policy. These allow organisations earlier access to RTGS services than might otherwise be the case. That access would still be subject to proportionate risk mitigation, allowing the organisation to prove their payments model alongside bringing themselves within the Bank’s risk tolerance for the provision of RTGS services.
• Reviewing the CHAPS tiering threshold of 2% of system value as a means to further enhance resilience by reducing risks where a significant proportion of payments are processed by CHAPS sponsor banks. We recognise there is an important role for indirect access to CHAPS to cater to various business models and that a healthy market for indirect access provision may also contribute to innovation. Before deciding on a course of action, we therefore want to better understand key factors like the mitigants to concentration risk within CHAPS and the potential implications of expanded direct access on indirect access provision. We will therefore engage with the industry over the coming months to further understand the nature of these costs and risks and assess any financial stability implications before deciding.

Omnibus accounts

In April 2021, we announced a policy to enable regulated payment system operators to hold an omnibus account. An omnibus account holds a pool of participant funds that can be used to fund settlement on the payment system operators’ ledger. The funds constitute reserves with the central bank based on defined legal arrangements put in place by the payment system operator to hold the funds in trust on behalf of the participants. Funding movements to and from the omnibus account are via CHAPS. This creates options for reserves-backed arrangements to support new and innovative financial market infrastructures. We have one omnibus account holder live as well as interest from a number of other potential omnibus account holders.

NBPSP safeguarding

Industry feedback highlighted that reliance on a small number of commercial banks for safeguarding has made it harder for non-bank payment service providers (NBPSPs) to obtain access to safeguarding accounts. This may put NBPSPs at a competitive disadvantage relative to banks.

We are exploring whether, and if so on what terms, we could offer NBPSPs settlement accounts with safeguarding facilities for client funds. Typically, settlement accounts are unremunerated. Allowing NBPSPs to safeguard client funds in RTGS could help to enhance growth opportunities and innovation by levelling the playing field in the payment ecosystem. It would also decrease operational risk as back and forth movements between an NBPSP’s RTGS client funds settlement account and a commercial bank safeguarding account would no longer be required. These benefits must be evaluated relative to the potential risks from increased NBPSP access to our balance sheet as well as the implications for monetary and financial stability.

RTGS and CHAPS tariffs

The cost of running RTGS and CHAPS is recovered by the Bank from industry, via the RTGS and CHAPS tariffs. Given the renewal of RTGS and wider changes to the payments landscape, we designed a new framework for the RTGS and CHAPS tariffs. This is based on a set of principles (proportionate; simple and efficient; stable and predictable; supportive of competition and access; and supportive of the Bank’s monetary and financial stability mission and RTGS/CHAPS policy objectives) and was informed through external consultation during 2022 and early 2023.

The revised tariff framework, which took effect on 28 April 2025, aims to support better alignment of tariffs with the benefits of settlement in central bank money, using a combination of volume and value-based fees. The first tranche of participation fees has already been collected.

3: Responsive

Stakeholder engagement

We undertake a broad programme of engagement with external stakeholders given the importance of understanding stakeholder needs as well as communicating what we need them to do. Following a refresh of our external engagement strategy following delivery of RT2, we are setting up a new RTGS/CHAPS Industry Forum to replace the previous Strategic Advisory Forum. We engage bilaterally with senior industry contacts and through trade associations. We will continue to engage domestically and internationally with our counterparts operating other RTGS and high-value payment systems on topics including ISO 20022, retail fraud and cross-border payments.

We have consulted stakeholders on a variety of topics relating to the RTGS and CHAPS live services as well as the RTGS Renewal Programme and beyond. We have also held a series of industry events to support the RTGS Renewal Programme including briefings and seminars. Topics have included retail fraud, our ISO 20022, and readiness for the go-live of the renewed RTGS service.

To support the design and delivery of features under the Future Roadmap for RTGS, we have worked closely with the industry as part of co-creation. We have a series of focused thematic engagement groups to gather input into high-level design and business case development of the priority features. We also draw on bilateral engagement and surveys and consultations.

Horizon scanning

We have recently refreshed our approach to horizon scanning to inform our strategy for RTGS and CHAPS. We undertake horizon scanning to identify and assess developments in the payments landscape from the perspective of understanding the changes, opportunities and/or risks that these developments may pose.

We gather and analyse information on developments drawing on a network of experts across the Bank, as well external stakeholders including private sector organisations as well as financial authorities including the Payment Systems Regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority and other central banks.

We have explored a range of developments in the past year including artificial intelligence, open banking and enhancements in international RTGS infrastructure.

Retail fraud in CHAPS

The Payment Systems Regulator required Pay.UK, as the operator of Faster Payments, to implement rules to require participants in Faster Payments to reimburse consumers for losses due to authorised push payment fraud. These arrangements took effect from 7 October 2024.

The Bank, as the operator of the CHAPS payment system, remains committed to achieving comparable outcomes of consumer protection for consumers making retail payments via CHAPS relative to if the payment had been made using Faster Payments. The arrangements for CHAPS reflect the unique characteristics of CHAPS as a wholesale payment system and only covers participants who process CHAPS payments for UK retail use. Refer to Box D: Retail fraud in CHAPS for further information.

We worked with the Payment Systems Regulator and CHAPS Direct Participants, as well as other key stakeholders, to deliver this. The approach was implemented through a combination of directions from the Payment Systems Regulator to CHAPS participants as well as changes to the CHAPS rulebook setting the same upper limit of £85,000 as Faster Payments.

ISO 20022 payment messaging standard

Benefits of ISO 20022 adoption

ISO 20022 is the established international financial services messaging standard that has the potential to realise significant benefits to the UK’s payments industry.

The adoption of the ISO 20022 messaging standard for CHAPS and RTGS will mean the availability of richer, enhanced and more structured data in UK payments. Implementation of the international standard will increase the efficiency of payments by reducing manual interventions, improve resilience and security via enhanced means to identify suspicious transactions and open up new opportunities for analytics, enhancing competition and innovation in the market.

CHAPS ISO messages

Since the migration to ISO 20022 in June 2023, all CHAPS Direct Participants must be able to send and receive enhanced ISO 20022 payment messages. The Bank continues to make the ISO schemas and technical guidance available on MyStandards.

Since May 2025, we have mandated ISO 20022 enhanced data, such as Purpose Codes and Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) for certain CHAPS payments. We encourage CHAPS Direct Participants to send enhanced data (ie above that mandated) where possible, considering relevant international guidance, to support the benefits of the ISO 20022 standard.

We have aligned our timetable for mandating structured addresses with HVPS+ and CBPR+, so fully structured addresses will be encouraged from November 2025 with hybrid addresses enabled, and unstructured addresses will be rejected from November 2026.

We expect to mandate the use of structured remittance data from November 2027.

For further information on the phased adoption of ISO 20022, refer to Box E: ISO 20022 for RTGS and CHAPS.

Domestic co-ordination and wider adoption

The Standards Advisory Panel provides strategic advice to the Bank and Pay.UK on standard issues, including facilitating a wider strategic direction for UK payment standards. The panel works closely with UK Finance’s Standards Engagement Forum.

To help realise the benefits of ISO 20022, we have worked with a wide range of external stakeholders to provide advice, guidance and information to CHAPS Direct Participants and the wider industry. This includes webinars and other materials that aim to inform, support and encourage enhanced adoption.

To realise the benefits of the richer ISO 20022 data, we are seeking to catalyse the development of a standard approach to best practice for using ISO 20022 enhanced data for CHAPS payments. Market guidance identifying existing pain points in payment messaging standards has already been published for property payments and corporate payments. We have recently set up a Corporate Remittance Working Group with the support of UK Finance and the Association of Corporate Treasurers and are in the process of setting up a Property Working Group for strategic discussions around ISO implementation and best practice.

Enhancing cross-border payments

We have continued to input extensively to international efforts led by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), and other relevant international organisations and standard-setters to enhance cross border-payments via the G20 Roadmap. This work is structured around 15 priority actions, which collectively aim to address the challenges of high costs, low speed, limited access and insufficient transparency.

There have been a number of important recommendations on measures to enhance cross-border payments.

• In October 2024, CPMI issued recommendations and a toolkit to promote the harmonisation of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enhance cross-border payments. APIs can facilitate more efficient and faster cross-border payments.
• CPMI issued its final report on governance and oversight for linking fast payment systems across borders:
• In December 2024, the FSB issued final recommendations to address frictions in data flows related to cross-border payments and to promote a level playing field between bank and non-bank payment service providers.
• The Financial Action Task Force issued a second consultation in February 2025 on proposals to update its Recommendation 16. It has since finalised Recommendation 16, which includes important provisions to streamline international requirements to increase the safety and security of cross-border payments and help enhance cross-border payments.

We continue to advocate for specific measures proposed under the G20 Roadmap including wider uptake and use of LEIs. LEIs are 20-character standardised alpha-numeric code that enables unambiguous identification of legal entities, linking to consistent reference information about an entity and its organisation structure. Wider uptake of LEIs could enable a range of enhancements in cross-border payment processes.

A number of our other workstreams can contribute to enhancing cross-border payments.

• Our adoption of ISO 20022 improves payment system interoperability, reducing processing costs for payment service providers and aligning payment rails across jurisdictions.
• Longer and better aligned settlement hours could speed up cross-border payments, reduce settlement risk and simplify liquidity management.
• Increased direct access to payment systems can speed up payments and reduce costs through reducing the number of intermediaries a payment goes through.

RTGS Renewal Programme

The objectives of the RTGS Renewal Programme were to deliver benefits across five key areas: increased resilience, greater access, wider interoperability, improved user functionality, and strengthened end-to-end risk management for CHAPS. Renewing RTGS was necessary as the way payments are made has changed dramatically in recent years. Together these benefits bring enhanced competition within the payments industry and enhanced resilience.

In April 2025, we successfully completed the final stage of the Programme, TS3, and moved to a new core ledger and settlement engine for RTGS, RT2. We are grateful for the support from the industry on our journey to this significant milestone.

Figure 1: RTGS Renewal vision

RT2 – delivering a renewed RTGS

In line with the vision above, the renewed RTGS service delivers a more resilient, flexible and innovative sterling settlement system to support monetary and financial stability.

• A modular design for the new core ledger and settlement engine supports an increased cadence of change. It will enable future changes to be more efficient and quicker.
• Strengthened resilience through increased perimeter security through the creation of a dedicated secure zone; improvements to dual-site functionality to reduce the impact of technical issues on service availability; and a trusted independent store of data to enhance the ability to recover from extreme loss of data integrity and cyber attacks.
• RTGS is now operational near 23/7 for some administrative tasks, including a participant moving money between its own accounts being possible around 19/7. The current inter-participant settlement windows have not changed. We are working with industry to assess the case for extending settlement hours as part of the future roadmap for RTGS.
• We are facilitating greater direct access to central bank money settlement for a wider range of participants to help reduce tiering risks and promote competition and innovation. RTGS will be able to accommodate a substantially higher number of account holders; offer streamlined and simplified onboarding; and we are putting in place a more proportionate, risk-based assurance model.

Functionality

The primary externally visible change for TS3 is a new core ledger and settlement engine for RTGS. This is the system that hold accounts and supports the transfer of funds between them.

• We introduced a new and enhanced user interface for RTGS (Bank of England Real Time Interface (BERTI)). This provides a simpler user access model than previously and participants are largely to self-manage their users.
• RTGS has moved fully to ISO 20022 messages – we introduced ISO 20022 for CHAPS payments in June 2023. From TS3, ISO 20022 has also been used for all statements and various notifications delivered by Swift. We adopted ISO 20022 for the net settlement instructions submitted to RTGS for settlement by several payment system operators.
• We can accept CHAPS payments up to 10 days in advance, providing resilient benefits; we enhanced the algorithms and performance of the Liquidity Saving Mechanism to seek to provide greater liquidity savings, lowering liquidity costs.
• A range of APIs are available to CHAPS Direct Participants and other account holders. APIs provide richer access to payment and liquidity data, enabling smoother payments processing and more automated liquidity management.
• A new reporting and analytics service is available to all account holders, not just CHAPS Direct Participants.

Future change in RTGS and CHAPS

While TS3 marked the formal end of the RTGS Renewal Programme, to achieve our strategic objectives, we need an ongoing programme of change – from small change and continuous improvement to further strategic deliverables.

Small and medium change

Following a three-month hypercare period, our focus has turned to a series of maintenance releases to: fix outstanding minor defects; deliver functional improvements and update the CHAPS ISO 20022 messaging format.

Going forwards, we will have higher frequency, small change to ensure we maintain and improve the platform on a continual basis, delivered through a number of maintenance releases each year.

Future Roadmap for RTGS

To build on the benefits of RT2 and its strong platform for growth, we are also progressing the Future Roadmap for RTGS, which covers strategic change initiatives beyond the introduction of the new core ledger and settlement engine.

Our vision for the Future Roadmap is for RTGS to act as an open platform for the UK financial services industry and to facilitate safe and efficient settlement in central bank money.

Close industry collaboration is at the heart of our work on the future roadmap for RTGS. Since May 2023, this has included co-creation with industry to define business cases and design of priority features before we decide which features to implement and in what order. Co-creation includes thematic engagement groups on each priority feature, consultations, surveys, bilateral meetings and other industry forums.

We are currently prioritising extended settlement hours, a synchronisation interface, and new ways to connect to RTGS. We have started work to define an architectural blueprint for the future roadmap, which will further inform our work on dependencies and sequencing of the delivery of features.

Extending RTGS settlement hours

In February 2024, we published a DP on the potential benefits and costs of extending RTGS settlement hours. Feedback showed strong support – particularly to improve cross-border payments and liquidity management.

In October 2024, we set out our ambition to open CHAPS for settlement from 1:30am no earlier than 2027, as a first step toward near 24x7 settlement around the turn of the decade. We also committed to working with industry to shape the operating and support models needed to make this possible.

Building on industry feedback we published our first CP on extending settlement hours on 29 July 2025 with responses sought by 21 October; responses from all interested parties are welcome. In the CP, we have outlined our plan for CHAPS settlement starting from 1:30am and are we are seeking early views for discussion on extending the evening contingency window from 8pm to 10pm and enabling settlement during certain bank and public holiday weekends.

This work forms part of a broader global shift. The G20 and CPMI have identified extended RTGS hours as key to improving cross-border payments. Countries including India, Mexico, and Switzerland already operate near-continuous systems, while the US and euro area are actively consulting on further extensions. The UK’s proposed early morning opening would align us more closely with key financial centres in Asia, the Middle East, and North America – supporting global integration and enhancing our role in international financial infrastructure.

We plan to consult further on these proposals in early 2026, including on the potential end-state for CHAPS settlement hours. A policy statement on the 1:30am opening is expected by end-2025, followed by a second statement in 2026 covering evening and bank holiday settlement.

Facilitating innovation in wholesale settlement

The future roadmap features of synchronisation and extended settlement hours are key to facilitate innovation in wholesale payments as highlighted in the Bank’s DP on innovations in money and payments and to support the G20 roadmap to enhance cross-border payments.

Synchronisation

We are working closely with industry to design a synchronised settlement interface to RTGS. This will allow RTGS to interoperate with other ledgers (eg overseas RTGS and other assets such as land registries) and help interface with new payment technologies such as distributed ledger technology (DLT) to facilitate innovation.

Synchronisation could expand access to central bank money settlement by co-ordinating settlement in RTGS with the transfer of one or more other assets on another ledger. At present, we view synchronisation interfaces as a promising and near-term option for supporting new forms of settlement like tokenisation, given their potential to be deployed more quickly by building on the capabilities of RT2.

However, to ensure the Bank can best support new and efficient forms of settlement using central bank money, we are simultaneously embarking on a programme of wholesale experiments. These will help us to understand whether the enhancements currently being delivered to our infrastructure, like synchronisation, will be able to meet the demands of the future financial system, or if further innovation, like a wholesale CBDC, will be needed.

In April 2025, we published the results of Project Meridian FX, alongside the European Central Bank, in which we explored payment-versus-payment in foreign exchange, confirming the technical feasibility of interfacing RTGS with a range of external ledgers (including those based on DLT).

To further demonstrate synchronisation in a realistic setting, we are launching a Synchronisation Lab in 2026 with prospective synchronisation operators to test messaging flows in a non-live environment. This is an important first step in our journey to implementing synchronisation within RTGS and we expect it to provide a number of learnings and practical insights.

New ways to connect to RTGS

The new ways to connect to RTGS priority is designed to enhance its resilience in light of new services and evolving threats. This category also includes work to enhance settlement contingency.

Annex

Key speeches

Speech title	Speaker	Date
The future of money and payments	Andrew Bailey	26 October 2024
Payment cycles: An update on the Future Roadmap for the RTGS service	Victoria Cleland	16 December 2024
Innovating wholesale payments: building a resilient and innovative future	Victoria Cleland	25 March 2025
Renewed RTGS: Digital public infrastructure as a platform for innovation	Dave Ramsden	29 April 2025
International payment rails: the value of a harmonised gauge	Sarah Breeden	6 May 2025
RTGS 2: a launchpad for innovation	Victoria Cleland	24 June 2025
Synchronisation and beyond: enabling the next wave of financial innovation	Victoria Cleland	1 July 2025
The future of the multilateral economic system, and some news on the UK payments infrastructure	Andrew Bailey	15 July 2025