Bank of England Publishes Q2 2026 Payment and Settlement Statistics for RTGS and CHAPS

Key Takeaways

• The Bank of England's latest payment and settlement statistics show RTGS total settlement values reached £902,018 Million daily average in Q2 2026, with CHAPS volumes and values continuing their upward trend.
• Compliance teams at participating institutions should review the data for operational risk benchmarking, particularly regarding service availability incidents and settlement delays disclosed across RTGS infrastructure, CREST, and retail net settlement systems.

Deep Dive

This update is a routine but important data publication from the Bank of England covering RTGS (Real-Time Gross Settlement), CHAPS (Clearing House Automated Payment System), and related retail payment system statistics through Q2 2026 and August 2026. While this is a guidance/statistical disclosure rather than a new rule, compliance and operational risk teams at banks participating in CHAPS, CREST, Bacs, Faster Payments, and card schemes (Visa Europe, Mastercard, LINK, PEXA) should treat this as a key operational resilience and benchmarking resource. The data confirms continued growth in settlement values, with average daily RTGS settlement values rising to £902,018 Million in Q2 2026 from £896,612 Million in Q1 2026, and CHAPS average daily values up 4.8% year-on-year in August 2026.

A significant portion of the publication concerns RTGS service availability statistics, which are directly relevant to operational resilience obligations under the Bank of England's and PRA's outsourcing and operational resilience frameworks. The historical incident log reveals recurring causes of disruption, including SWIFT connectivity failures, certificate expirations, and internal messaging issues, several of which breached or approached important business service impact tolerances (e.g., the 245-minute CHAPS outage in July 2024 and multiple SWIFT-related disruptions in 2023 and 2025). Firms should map these incidents against their own third-party and concentration risk assessments, particularly given reliance on SWIFT as critical infrastructure.

From a timeline perspective, firms should note the April 2025 migration to the new RTGS core ledger and settlement engine (replacing Enquiry Link with BERTI), which remains a relevant reference point for any legacy system reconciliation or user-access reviews. There are no new compliance deadlines in this update, but institutions should incorporate the latest statistics into periodic payment system risk reporting, liquidity stress testing assumptions, and board-level operational resilience dashboards.

Recommended actions include: (1) updating internal risk registers with the latest incident disclosures and assessing exposure to similar failure modes; (2) benchmarking internal CHAPS/CREST volumes and values against sector-wide trends to detect anomalies; (3) confirming business continuity and contingency arrangements remain aligned with Bank of England expectations, especially for CREST settlement continuing independently of RTGS; and (4) briefing operational resilience and payments teams on the BERTI transition and any residual legacy risks. Overall risk impact is low-to-moderate, primarily informational, but the underlying operational resilience data carries ongoing relevance for third-party risk management and critical infrastructure dependency reviews.

Source: Bank of England