Number of unplanned outages in RTGS systems doubles
Central banks with longest average downtime typically plan to upgrade system within a year
Central banks experienced more disruptions in real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems over the past 12 months than in the year before, the Payments Benchmarks 2026 show.
Unplanned outages averaged 2.2 incidents across 38 respondents in the past year. They were up from the average of one outage across 40 central banks in the 2025 benchmark. A high income respondent from the Americas reported the highest number of interruptions in RTGS systems this year.
The average length of downtime was 4.7
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