Financial AtlasTo the mapУкраїнська

PAYMENTS

Interbank systems

Where money finally moves from one bank’s account to another bank’s account.

Open on the interactive map →

This page is the text version of one zone of the interactive map.

Its role in the system

The nerve centre of money moving between banks: this is where a payment finally passes from one bank's account to another's — at the central bank, in "central bank money". Large and urgent payments go through real-time gross settlement systems (RTGS); masses of small ones go through clearing houses. Every other payment zone on the map, from cards to SWIFT, rests on these systems.

Functions

  1. Final settlement — the transfer of money between banks' accounts at the central bank; after it the payment is irrevocable, even if the paying bank goes bankrupt tomorrow.
  2. Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) — every large payment is processed separately and immediately: 🇪🇺 T2 (the Eurosystem), 🇺🇸 Fedwire (the Fed), 🇬🇧 RTGS/CHAPS (the Bank of England).
  3. Clearing of bulk payments — clearing houses (ACH) collect millions of wages, utility bills and standing payments, net off the offsetting amounts and pass only the balance into RTGS: 🇪🇺 STEP2 (EBA Clearing), 🇺🇸 the ACH network, 🇬🇧 Bacs.
  4. Instant settlement 24/7 — a separate layer for transfers in seconds at any hour: 🇪🇺 TIPS, 🇬🇧 Faster Payments (since 2008), 🇺🇸 FedNow (since 2023). 🇪🇺 Since October 2025 euro-area banks must check the payee's name against the account number before every euro transfer and warn the payer of a mismatch. Liability follows directly from that: if the warning was given and the payer confirmed anyway, the risk is theirs; if the bank never ran the check, the bank pays.
  5. Settlement for other systems — the balances of card networks, exchanges and depositories are closed in RTGS; the central bank also runs its monetary operations and gives banks intraday credit through it.

What makes it special

  • Whose rails and whose money: the key systems usually belong to the central bank and run as infrastructure rather than a business — the tariffs cover the costs; clearing houses can be private, often jointly owned by banks. Settlement in RTGS is a movement between banks' reserve accounts at the central bank, the safest money in the system, which is why only banks and a small number of licensed institutions have direct access and everyone else goes through them. These systems are overseen against the international principles for financial market infrastructures (🌍 the PFMI from CPMI and IOSCO): continuity, cyber resilience, backup sites — the cost of an outage here is not the operator's loss but a halt to the economy.
  • Intraday liquidity: to send a payment, a bank must have the money on its central bank account right now; shortfalls are covered by intraday credit against collateral. A bank that holds back outgoing payments to "wait" for incoming ones slows the whole system down.
  • A common language, ISO 20022: the world is moving to a single payment message standard with rich data (who, to whom, for what): 🇪🇺 T2 has run on it since March 2023, when it replaced TARGET2; 🇬🇧 CHAPS since June 2023; 🇺🇸 Fedwire since July 2025.
  • 🇨🇳 China: interbank payments run through the People's Bank of China's CNAPS, operated by the China National Clearing Center: large and urgent ones through HVPS in real time, bulk ones in batches through BEPS, and small transfers between banks through IBPS, which has run around the clock since 2010. It shows the difference between speed and settlement clearly: the payee sees the money in seconds, while the banks square their mutual obligations in several net cycles a day. Separately there is CIPS, the settlement system for renminbi payments crossing the border (since 2015; as of mid-2025, 176 direct and more than 1,500 indirect participants across 121 countries); it does not replace SWIFT, because most of its messages still travel over the SWIFT network.
  • 🇯🇵 Japan: final settlement happens in the Bank of Japan's BOJ-NET, while interbank transfers for people and companies go through Zengin, a private system the banks built and run together; it added the "More Time System" in October 2018 and now operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The split of roles differs from China's: the state holds final settlement, and the banks keep the retail layer themselves.
  • Blockchain between banks — what works and what does not: what actually reached production is not "crypto between banks" but tokenised deposits and settlement in central bank money. Kinexys (formerly JPM Coin) at J.P. Morgan has moved more than 3 trillion dollars since launch and averages over 5 billion dollars a day (April 2026) — while the same bank's payments business moves around 10 trillion dollars a day on ordinary rails. 🇬🇧 Fnality has run a sterling system since December 2023 in which participants' balances are fully backed by money in an omnibus account at the Bank of England, while its dollar and euro systems were still with regulators as of 2026. 🇨🇭 Switzerland has given banks a wholesale digital franc for settling digital bonds on the SDX exchange since the end of 2023 — the pilot has been extended to at least mid-2027, and the central bank stresses that this is no promise to introduce it permanently; 🇪🇺 the Eurosystem plans to pilot Pontes, linking DLT platforms to T2, by the end of the third quarter of 2026. RippleNet, with XRP as a "bridge", really does carry transfers — 🇯🇵 SBI Remit has sent money from Japan to the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia since 2023 — but that is a payment company's service, not final settlement between banks. Project mBridge (the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia) reached working-prototype stage in 2024, after which the Bank for International Settlements left the project in October 2024 and handed it to the participants. The last leg still closes in central bank money: under the PFMI, settlement should be made in it, because a claim on a commercial bank loses its value together with that bank.

Why it matters

When RTGS stops, everything freezes: property transactions, the settlement of exchanges and card networks, wage payments and government payments. That is why these systems have backup sites and emergency procedures — and still sometimes go down.

🇬🇧 The Bank of England RTGS outage, October 2014

the settlement system stood still for nine hours because of defects introduced during earlier code updates; some house purchases fell through for a day. The payments were only completed thanks to an extended operating day, and the independent review became one of the reasons for rebuilding Britain's RTGS from the ground up.

🇪🇺 The TARGET services outage, February 2025

the simultaneous failure of two duplicated ports in a storage system left T2 effectively unavailable for about 10 hours and securities settlement in T2S for about 8; the close of day had to be pushed into the night. The ECB's review called for earlier detection of hardware failures and clearer rules for switching to the backup site.

🇺🇸 New rails for the dollar: FedNow and Fedwire, 2023–2025

in July 2023 the Federal Reserve launched FedNow, its first new payment rail in more than forty years: transfers settle in seconds, around the clock, every day of the year. Two years later, on 14 July 2025, Fedwire — the RTGS through which the largest dollar payments pass — switched to the ISO 20022 message standard over a single weekend, after the date had been postponed more than once. Rebuilding a country's core payment rails takes years and is not allowed to fail: everything else settles on top of them.

Links to other zones · 10

  • Banking & Credit InstitutionsInterbank systems are built around Banking & Credit Institutions: banks hold accounts at the central bank and manage liquidity for their own and their clients' payments.
  • Card networksInterbank systems close the loop for Card networks: after a day of card transactions the netted balances between banks reach final settlement in the national RTGS system.
  • Clearing & settlementInterbank systems settle the cash side of securities trades in central bank money, delivery versus payment, alongside Clearing & settlement (🇪🇺 T2S).
  • Crypto / CBDCInterbank systems are moving onto new rails: instead of a message into an RTGS, a token on a shared ledger from Crypto / CBDC — yet finality still comes from the central bank, through omnibus accounts, wholesale CBDC pilots and the ECB's Pontes link to TARGET services.
  • Digital paymentsInterbank systems are what makes Digital payments instant: a tap in an app travels over central bank infrastructure like TIPS or FedNow, which moves the money between the two banks in seconds.
  • Financial Market InfrastructureInterbank systems that matter systemically are overseen by Financial Market Infrastructure under the PFMI principles; oversight usually sits in the same central bank but apart from the operator.
  • Fiscal PolicyTax receipts, budget payments and settlement of government bond auctions all travel over Interbank systems — Fiscal Policy is one of the heaviest users of these rails.
  • International transfersInterbank systems provide the final leg of International transfers: SWIFT messages and correspondent accounts carry the instruction, but the currency itself moves only in the RTGS system of its home country — Fedwire for the dollar, T2 for the euro.
  • Monetary PolicyInterbank systems at the top level belong to Monetary Policy: the central bank owns and runs the RTGS, conducts its operations through it and supplies banks with intraday liquidity against collateral.
  • Technology & InfrastructureFor Interbank systems, Technology & Infrastructure is critical software: backup data centres, cyber resilience and the migration to the ISO 20022 messaging standard become multi-year technology programmes.

Regulation and supervision

Supervised by: Anti-Money Laundering

RTGS systems and clearing houses do not vet customers themselves — their member banks do. But every instruction must carry full payer and payee data (🌍 FATF's travel rule, R.16) and pass sanctions screening: 🇪🇺 Regulation 2023/1113, 🇺🇸 OFAC.

Standards: FATF Recommendation 16 (payment transparency, updated 2025) · FATF Recommendation 6 (targeted financial sanctions) · EU Transfer of Funds Regulation 2023/1113 · EU/US sanctions regimes

Supervised by: Financial Market Infrastructure

Systemically important payment systems are overseen by the central bank against the 🌍 CPMI-IOSCO Principles: settlement finality, surviving a member's default, cyber resilience and recovery within hours. 🇪🇺 the ECB's SIPS Regulation and DORA; 🇺🇸 the Fed's Regulation HH.

Standards: CPMI-IOSCO Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (2012) · CPMI-IOSCO Guidance on cyber resilience for FMIs (2016) · ECB SIPS Regulation (EU) No 795/2014 · EU Settlement Finality Directive 98/26 · EU DORA 2022/2554 · US Federal Reserve Regulation HH

Careers in this zone · 6

RTGS payment operations manager

Works in the operations centre of the central bank's system: watches payment queues, limits and the schedule of the operating day, helps participants whose payment is stuck, and triggers emergency procedures. On the day of an outage it is this team that decides when to switch to the backup site and whether to extend the day.

What you need to know

  • RTGS architecture: queues, priorities, liquidity-saving mechanisms
  • The system's rulebook and the operating day
  • The ISO 20022 message standard
  • Central bank intraday credit and eligible collateral
  • Business continuity procedures (BCP) and backup sites

Skills

  • Calm and discipline in a crisis
  • Real-time monitoring of flows
  • Clear communication with participants
  • Precise execution of procedures

Certifications: Usually not required — training happens inside the central bank; courses on payment infrastructure and ISO 20022 are useful

Intraday liquidity manager (payments liquidity)

At a participating bank, plans and controls that there is enough money on the central bank account through the day for all outgoing payments — the bank's own, its clients', and settlements with card networks and exchanges. Decides which payments go first, when to draw central bank credit against collateral, and how not to get stuck before the close of day.

What you need to know

  • The RTGS operating day schedule and cut-offs for different systems
  • Intraday credit and collateral management
  • Forecasting incoming and outgoing flows
  • Bank liquidity ratios (LCR) and intraday liquidity reporting
  • The settlement of clearing houses and card schemes

Skills

  • Fast decisions against the clock
  • Excel / SQL for flow forecasts
  • Coordination with treasury and payment operations
  • Working across several systems at once

Certifications: Usually not required — treasury experience counts; CTP (AFP) and the ACI Operations Certificate are useful; the ACI Dealing Certificate if the role also covers money market operations

Bulk payments clearing manager (ACH)

Is responsible for batch flows — wages, pensions, utility bills, direct debits: that the files reach the clearing house on time, that the netting adds up, and that returns and rejections are processed. Works with scheme rules and participant limits and investigates incidents when thousands of payments fail to arrive.

What you need to know

  • The rules of credit transfer and direct debit schemes (🇪🇺 SEPA SCT/SDD, 🇺🇸 Nacha)
  • The mechanics of netting and settlement cycles
  • Processing returns, recalls and misdirected payments
  • ISO 20022 file and message formats

Skills

  • Control of large data batches
  • Root cause analysis of failures
  • Working with corporate clients and public bodies
  • Method and attention to deadlines

Certifications: 🇺🇸 AAP — Accredited ACH Professional (Nacha); elsewhere, the schemes' own programmes

Payment standards business analyst (ISO 20022)

Translates the requirements of payment systems and regulators into the language of IT: which message fields to populate, how to map old formats onto new ones, what to change in the bank's systems before the cutover date. After migration, watches the quality of data in payments — speed and sanctions screening both depend on it.

What you need to know

  • ISO 20022: the structure of pacs, pain and camt messages
  • The rules of specific systems (T2, CHAPS, Fedwire) and their change calendars
  • The path of a payment from the client to RTGS
  • Requirements for payer and payee data (FATF, the travel rule)

Skills

  • Writing functional specifications
  • SQL and work with test environments
  • Brokering between the business, IT and suppliers
  • Managing migration projects

Certifications: Not required; Swift's and national operators' ISO 20022 training programmes are useful

Operational resilience manager for payment infrastructure

Prepares the system and the bank for a bad day: failure scenarios, backup sites, manual procedures, switchover exercises. After incidents, works out the causes and proves the fixes will hold — in payments the regulator expects recovery in hours, not days.

What you need to know

  • The PFMI principles on operational risk and cyber resilience
  • Business continuity management (BCM) and impact tolerances
  • Regulatory operational resilience requirements (🇪🇺 DORA)
  • Data centre architecture and redundancy
  • Third-party supplier risk management

Skills

  • Running exercises and stress scenarios
  • Incident investigation (root cause)
  • Reports for the regulator and the board
  • Coordinating IT, operations and suppliers

Certifications: ISO 22301 Lead Implementer, CBCI (Business Continuity Institute); for the cyber side, CISSP

Central bank payment data and flow analyst

Analyses how money moves between banks: concentration, bottlenecks, participants' behaviour under stress, how flows change after instant payments are launched. The findings feed decisions on tariffs and system rules, and financial stability assessments.

What you need to know

  • The structure of the national payment system and participants' roles
  • Network analysis and liquidity metrics
  • The basics of monetary policy and financial stability
  • Payment statistics and reporting methodologies

Skills

  • Python / R, SQL
  • Visualising large transaction datasets
  • Explaining conclusions in plain language
  • Academic writing for analytical notes

Certifications: Usually not required — a background in economics, statistics or data science is valued

All zones of the Atlas