The Importance of Wholesale Payments
Wholesale payments are the lifeblood of financial markets. They play a critical role in ensuring liquidity and stability in the financial system, and the smooth functioning of markets and economic activity. For years, the Bank of England (“the Bank”) has had responsibility for delivering trust and confidence in sterling wholesale payments, ensuring they continue to support the variety of payments needs across our financial system.
We are now seeing those needs begin to shift, with an increased demand for tokenised securities and other real-world assets on DLT that support atomic settlement (delivery versus payment), reduce counterparty risk, and provide advanced functionality using programmability. To meet that demand, there has been an equally significant uptick in the use of innovative settlement assets like stablecoins and tokenised deposits. Given the Bank’s role as the provider of the safest and most trusted form of settlement asset – central bank money – it is only natural that our work on wholesale payments responds to those shifting needs. This will ensure that core financial markets are underpinned by safe and trusted settlement assets, to support responsible innovation.
The Bank’s Response to Wholesale Payments Innovation
The Bank’s key role in the wholesale payments space is in our operation of the UK’s Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) infrastructure. We delivered a renewed RTGS service (RT2) in April 2025 to serve as an open platform for sustainable innovation, but our work doesn’t end here. Our intention with RT2 is for it to serve as an evolving piece of public infrastructure that we can build on with new functionality and features. We call these new features our Future Roadmap for RTGS, which includes projects like extending our settlement hours and building a synchronisation capability.
The latter synchronisation capability is a near-term innovation that enables the Bank to extend the safety and finality of settlement in central bank money to a wider and more complex set of asset markets, while preserving RTGS as a stable and resilient public infrastructure. Rather than building entirely new wholesale payment systems, synchronisation enhances RTGS’ interoperability with external asset ledgers – both existing and emerging – allowing atomic settlement to be achieved across heterogenous technologies, including both DLT and non-DLT platforms. Synchronisation supports this by enabling the … Download your sample issue here!
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