The Bank of England announced a plan to replace the existing CHAPS system. Our vision is to develop an RTGS service which is fit for the future, enabling improved resilience, enhanced user functionality and access, wider interoperability and strengthened end-to-end risk management of the UK’s High Value Payment System.
Specific enhancements include:
- The flexibility and protections necessary to ensure continuity of service and integrity of data across a wide range of possible scenarios, including but not limited to cyber attack;
- Strengthened contingency messaging arrangements introduced, and the renewed RTGS will be designed to be ‘channel-agnostic’ (ie with the capacity to accept payment messages from multiple sources in normal operations);
- Expanding eligibility to RTGS to non-bank Payment Service Providers, subject to appropriate safeguards;
- Capability to supporting innovative payments technologies of the future;
- Giving users more flexibility to reroute payments, especially if outages do occur, and facilitate efficiency gains by providing the tools to enable participants to streamline their back offices;
- The introduction of ISO 20022 messaging, alongside similar reform in retail payments being driven by the Payments Strategy Forum and the Payment System Operators; and
- To be technologically capable of near 24 hour operation during business days from the outset, with short settlement windows also potentially available at weekends.
Since the last update in June, the programme has:
- Worked with shortlisted bidders to discuss approaches and reply to specific questions;
- Published drafts of the ISO 20022 messages to be used in the like-for-like phase of the CHAPS migration;
- Continued to discuss a range of topics linked to the ISO 20022 messaging standard, with the Bank and Pay.UK using this joint forum to explore themes around benefits criteria, change management, strategic communications and the use of meta data and purpose codes; and
- Bank's approach to tariffs in the renewed RTGS service ahead of an industry-wide consultation later this year. Valuable input was also given on next steps for synchronisation.
The ACT Policy and Technical team attend meetings of the RTGS Renewal Programme organised by the Bank of England.
