The Central Bank of Iceland (CBI) has gone live with a new real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) and instant payment platform.
The Central Bank of Iceland manages all interbank payments in the country: it currently processes up to one million payments per day with peaks of 160,000 per hour - despite the small population of just over 365,000 inhabitants.
The new system has been developed in order to manage up to 5 million payments per day and each transaction is on average processed in less than 40 milliseconds.
Developed by Italy's SIA, the new payments infrastructure has been implemented as a single platform capable of processing bank-to-bank, P2P, P2B and B2B transactions in a consolidated operating model.
Sturla Pálsson, director for markets department of the Central Bank of Iceland, comments: “An efficient and secure payment system is one of the prerequisites for smooth, normal business transactions in a modern economy. We need to use the best available tools at all times."
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