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7 December 2022
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The TARGET2/T2S consolidation, which is also referred to as a Big Bang, will take place, in contrast, in a very familiar space – in an environment with international standards, infrastructures, interfaces, and processes. So, it won’t really be a Big Bang for the payment transactions system, but will definitely mark a changeover with a certain bombshell effect.
For 15 years now, the European Union has had the TARGET2 single shared platform at its command for real-time gross settlement of payments in euro. In addition to that, the European Central Bank operates the TARGET2 Securities (T2S) system for the settlement of securities transactions and the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) system. Those two systems heretofore have had only interface connections to TARGET2, but otherwise are largely autonomous. Harmonized use of the platforms has also been hampered by the fact that they currently employ different messaging standards. But on bank business day 20 March 2023, the big moment will finally arrive: From then on, all messaging between and within the three platforms will be based exclusively on the ISO 20022 standard. This marks the most important change for the approximately 1,500 participating financial institutions. One of them is SECB Swiss Euro Clearing Bank GmbH, whose responsibilities on behalf of the Swiss financial industry include facilitating cross-border payment transactions in euro between Swiss financial institutions and TARGET2. For SECB as well, the reality from the start of spring 2023 onward will be that TARGET2 has been switched off and the migration to T2 has taken place without a transition period of them running side by side simultaneously.
The TARGET2/T2S consolidation brings additional major changes alongside the introduction of ISO 20022. All three TARGET Services (RTGS, T2S, TIPS) have shared components such as a master data directory and centralized liquidity management, for example. This allows a financial institution to steer all of its service-related operations through a single central bank money account, enabling the automation of a wide range of liquidity management processes and message processing. Two network service providers provide access to these services from other payment systems (e.g., EURO1/STEP1, RT1, STEP2) through a central access point.
Financial institutions will now also be able to settle payments during nighttime hours. A uniform graphical user interface is another advantage of the migration for direct and indirect participants and their affiliated financial institutions.
Alongside optimizations of functionalities and procedures, the European Central Bank has pledged to optimize IT security to counter the increased threat of cyberattacks.
The Big Bang migration was actually supposed to take place back in November 2021, but the go-live was at first postponed to this year. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting hampering of migration readiness, but primarily also the delay by SWIFT in introducing ISO 20022 in correspondent bank transactions, made a postponement of the migration date unavoidable. After all, ensuring interoperability between their foreign and RTGS payment traffic was one of the main challenges for most participants.
The project is being managed by national central banks following a uniform roadmap, and migration readiness has been regularly monitored through pan-European surveys. Particularly toward the end of the project, surveys yielded the finding that the official trial period for fulfilling mandatory test cases needed to be extended by three weeks to allow all participants to successfully complete their tests.
SECB started its impact analysis in early 2019 to identify and gauge the effects that the TARGET2/T2S consolidation would have on its payment settlement business processes, on liquidity management, and on its payment system, as well as to determine what adjustments needed to be made to the network connection through SWIFT.
Although specifications and requirements were basically known from the outset of the project, iterative public communication of changes by the European Central Bank regarding the project timeline, the messaging standard, and the functionalities of TARGET Services didn’t allow SECB to carry out adjustments to its system until 2021.
Last but not least, the official project deferral initially caused more aggravation than relief. But in the end, the postponement turned out well for SECB because it enabled SECB to proceed step by step. First, the migration of SWIFT applications in IT operations at SIX was carried out at the end of 2020. Then the remaining application landscape was migrated in the second quarter of 2022. Those two steps laid the foundation for the network connection to TARGET Services and for the stable operation of SECB’s own payment system.
Ever since the SWIFT service bureau at SIX set up a connection to the TARGET Services test environment for SECB at the start of this year, SECB gradually completed sequential internal and external testing successfully without using the additional three-week extension granted.
The ongoing last stage of the project focuses on final migration testing, getting staff up to speed, and conducting user acceptance testing for the conversion to the ISO 20022 standard introduced on 21 November 2022, in euroSIC release 4.9. Because even though SECB will no longer process SWIFT FIN messages in payment transactions once TARGET Services have switched to the ISO 20022 standard, this in no way means that all messages can simply be passed on through the system.
In fact, the toughest challenge is and remains ensuring interoperability between the different “flavors” of the ISO 20022 standard and ensuring interoperability between ISO 20022 and SWIFT FIN during the transition phase until 20 March 2023.
The standard’s differing peculiarities in TARGET Services and in the current euroSIC release create manifold challenges.
This is well illustrated by the example of a customer payment that gets transmitted to a euroSIC participant through TARGET. The information in the field “Instruction for Next Agent” for the attention of the payment recipient’s financial institution cannot be transferred to the corresponding field in euroSIC because it is already occupied by other content.
Laying out the solution to this problem would go beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, the SECB has a recipe for it.
Another essential, albeit less well known, service furnished by SECB is providing liquidity for the settlement of securities transactions in T2S for the Swiss central custodian SIX SIS. A separate facility was created a long time ago in collaboration with the Deutsche Bundesbank to enable SECB to provide this service. The TARGET2/T2S consolidation rendered parts of the facility untransferable, so new functionalities had to be set up.
All in all, SECB, as a pass-through financial institution for euro-denominated payments by euroSIC participants, would have already achieved certain efficiency gains today, particularly through the centralized management of liquidity, if the European Central Bank hadn’t once more postponed the start from 21 November 2022 to 20 March 2023, due to testing delays at some market participants.
But postponed doesn’t mean canceled. In due time, the uniform standard for SEPA, SWIFT, and now also TARGET payments will certainly simplify the ongoing adaptation of SECB’s back-end payment system.
SECB is excitedly looking forward to the Big Bang on the morning of 20 March 2023, and to the subsequent further expansion of the payments universe. The SECB will also be ready for the planned introduction of instant payments and for the full migration to ISO 20022 in correspondent bank business by 2025. ISO 20022 holds further potential in store here as well: More extensive and more structured information on parties to transactions enables SECB to stay in step with the mounting challenges involved in combating money laundering and sanction violations.
The TARGET2/T2S consolidation, in turn, may perhaps lend momentum to innovations and may even help get a digital euro and other visions harbored by the European Central Bank off the ground.
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