Industry favors longer CHAPS weekdays before weekend expansion
Industry respondents favor extending weekday RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours before adding Sundays and bank holidays, the Bank of England reported. The Bank has not decided the sequencing and plans a consultation response in early 2027.
Earlier payments and linked settlement
The Bank of England said implementation of a 1:30 a.m.
CHAPS opening is progressing; initial estimates put around 20 percent of payment volume before 6 a.m.
Longer hours support innovation, cross-border payments and liquidity and risk management.
Members raised costs, optional participation, downtime, incident support and value-date rollover: retain the 6 p.m.
CHAPS close or move nearer the calendar day.
RTGS synchronisation would enable atomic settlement between external asset ledgers and sterling central bank money, supporting tokenised assets and margin and collateral optimisation.
Work with HM Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority covers tokenised assets from issuance to settlement.
Industry feedback favors live activity beyond pilots.
Address rules meet outage planning
Following Swift's readiness concerns over removing unstructured address fields, the Bank delayed its November 2026 RTGS Standards Release.
Members supported exploring earlier CHAPS rules for structured addresses, particularly debtor addresses.
Customer-supplied creditor data, sort-code directory improvements, Swift interoperability and Pay.UK cross-border work remain dependencies.
Existing settlement contingencies cover only critical payments at small scale.
Members favored automation over manual processing; the Bank can also declare a non-settlement day.
Delivery depends on readiness
Longer hours still require decisions on liquidity, operating arrangements and rollover.
A Q4 2026 tokenisation roadmap and November synchronisation showcase precede further synchronisation information in early 2027.
The next forum is planned for January, with further discussions on near-term and longer-term contingency arrangements.