Laura WilesVictoria Cleland, Executive Director of Payments at the BoE, has given a speech on the Future Roadmap for BoE’s Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service, at FinTech Connect.
The BoE published a discussion paper on its approach to innovation in money and payments in July 2024, outlining its approach to wholesale, retail and international payments. The paper emphasised the importance of central bank money as the “ultimate risk-free asset”, and stressed that the BoE wants to ensure there is not a significant shift away from settlement in central bank money.
Cleland noted that to achieve this, the BoE would need to keep central bank money useful and relevant. It is currently undertaking a multi-year renewal programme for the RTGS infrastructure, with a view to providing a renewed service with increase resilience, which also enables competition and innovation. The focus of this review is improving user functionality, for example, by introducing APIs and an enhanced liquidity saving mechanism to support emerging user needs in payments.