Central Bank of Iceland goes live with new interbank payment system

The Central Bank of Iceland (CBI) and SIA, a European hi-tech company in payment services and infrastructures, have gone live with the new real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) and the new instant payment platform.

The new payments system is a more strategic and modern infrastructure and enables closer cooperation with other central banks.

CBI manages all interbank payments in the country: it currently processes up to one million payments with peaks of 160,000 per hour despite the small population of just over 365,000.

The new system has been developed in order to manage up to five million payments per day and each transaction is on average processed in less than 40 milliseconds.

According to the bank, the launch of the new gross settlement system and the new instant payment platform puts CBI in a prominent position within the evolution of digital payment infrastructures.

“An efficient and secure payment system is one of the prerequisites for smooth, normal business transactions in a modern economy. We need to use the best available tools at all times, and we are delighted with the implementation of the new interbank payment system from SIA,” said Sturla Pálsson, director for markets department of the CBI.

Eugenio Tornaghi, marketing and sales director of SIA, commented: “The successful go-live for the new interbank payment system of the Central Bank of Iceland confirms our strong partnership with Central Institutions to deliver secure, mission-critical and high-performance platforms and to enable challenging digital transformation programs in the payments ecosystem.”

“SIA is continuously using its innovation capabilities to extend the opportunities for Central Institutions to target new frontiers of instant payments, interoperability with different market infrastructures and services, account to account payments and digital currencies,” added Tornaghi.

SIA also recently partnered with Colt Technology Services to provide the European Central Bank (ECB) with connectivity services to the Eurosystem market infrastructures.