Bank of England and Accenture Announce Renewal of the Real-Time Gross Settlement Service

With the goal of developing a modern, wholesale payments infrastructure in the UK, the Bank of England partnered with Accenture to rebuild the digital core of the RTGS service—a system that underpins financial stability by securely settling payments between financial institutions instantly and supporting an average of £800 billion worth of transactions every day

As part of the program, Accenture delivered a new core ledger and settlement engine built on cloud-native modern architecture underpinned by end-to-end automation to improve interoperability, speed, and scalability. The system ensures smooth processing of important payments between institutions.

The renewed RTGS core platform went live on 28 April 2025, and in three months since launch, it has successfully processed over 9.4 million transactions valued at £35.2 trillion – with the highest single day processing 295,000 transactions. With faster onboarding features and external APIs to access data more easily, it can accommodate more participants than before, allowing for broader access to more financial entities and a more diverse ecosystem.

Shaheen Sayed, Head of Accenture in the UK, Ireland, and Africa, said: “The Bank of England is a true world leader in providing the technology foundations for financial stability, and we are exceptionally proud of what we have achieved together to renew the UK’s payments infrastructure and improve banking systems for years to come. The new service is a bedrock for resilience by ensuring financial institutions access a more modern and secure settlement engine. The RTGS is at the heart of the UK payments system, and the solution enables the seamless flow of value throughout the economy, empowering the industry to innovate.”

As part of the transformation, Accenture also delivered a range of enabling components of the new system, including enhanced automation that runs more than 40,000 tests daily. The platform, built to high technology specification, includes zero data loss recovery and “failover” features, that can quickly switch critical operations over to a temporary backup system should any issues arise.

Accenture also helped to deploy monitoring tools for visibility into daily operations and worked with the Bank of England to enhance knowledge and expertise, implementing Agile practices at scale, sustaining the project’s long-term value.

The Bank of England appointed Accenture as the delivery partner of the RTGS renewal program in 2020. More information can be found on the Bank of England’s website here.