Real-time Gross Settlement Systems: Breaking the wall of scalability and high availability

Mauro Arcese (), Domenico Di Giulio () and Vitangelo Lasorella ()
Additional contact information
Mauro Arcese: Bank of Italy
Domenico Di Giulio: Bank of Italy
Vitangelo Lasorella: Bank of Italy

No 2, Mercati, infrastrutture, sistemi di pagamento (Markets, Infrastructures, Payment Systems) from Bank of Italy, Directorate General for Markets and Payment System

Abstract: By leveraging the progress of information technology and computer networks, Real Time Gross Settlement systems (RTGS), which first appeared in the early 1990s, have quickly become the standard for the settlement of interbank payments in central bank money. However, the market of retail payments still relies on batch-based netting systems, as the huge volume of retail payments makes the architecture of a typical RTGS impractical in this context. The Eurosystem’s decision to provide a settlement service for instant payments has laid the foundation for the transformation of retail systems into real-time systems. A new design for settlement engines is needed, which should now be capable of settling an extremely high volume of payments in real time, while also operating continuously and exposing low transaction costs. This need has been the main driver for the design of the TIPS (Target Instant Payment Settlement) engine, a distributed, event-driven architecture based on principles of reactive applications and running on Linux/x86 commodity systems for cost efficiency. This paper shows how the traditional design of a mostly centralized, vertically scalable RTGS can be replaced by a distributed, horizontally scalable system, provided that the proper mix of parallel and sequential computation is used.

Keywords: TIPS; RTGS; distributed systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/mercati- ... SP.pdf?language_id=1 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wpmisp:mip_002_21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Mercati, infrastrutture, sistemi di pagamento (Markets, Infrastructures, Payment Systems) from Bank of Italy, Directorate General for Markets and Payment System Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().