Near-24/7 RTGS systems more susceptible to outages
Central banks with longest uptime also report highest number of contingency sites
Central banks operating real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems for near 24/7 are more likely to experience unplanned outages, the Payments Benchmarks 2025 reveal.
Across the whole sample, unplanned outages averaged one incident over the past 12 months among 40 central banks that shared data. Cases range from zero to a high of 13 in a lower-middle income central bank in Asia-Pacific.
Most benchmark respondents run their RTGS for 7–12 hours daily, but the technology operates for 17–24 hours in
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