The Bank of England has confirmed it will extend the operating hours of the high value payments system CHAPS from its current core operating hours of 6am to 6pm, as efforts to operate settlement on a 24 hours a day, seven days a week basis continue to move forward.
Following a 2025 consultation paper on extending settlement hours, BoE has confirmed that from September 2027 CHAPS payments can be made from 1.30am. Although consideration had been given to extending the evening window, the consultation reported a “mixed level of demand with fewer clear use‑cases identified particularly compared with other proposals”.
The anticipated benefits of extending the operating hours will support “earlier settlement, strengthen liquidity and operational resilience, and better align UK settlement with international markets,” the BoE said. Proposals to assess demand for bank holiday CHAPS payments are also under consideration.
The bank said the extension is a “core component” of the move toward 24/7 real-time gross settlement (RTGS), which is part of the bank’s future roadmap. The roadmap also includes synchronisation and the movement of money involving a two-stage ‘earmark and release’ process, which involves placing an earmark on assets on an asset ledger, or funds in the next-generation RT2 account, before releasing an earmark which initiates the transfer of locked funds and assets to settle the transaction.
The extension currently applies only to CHAPS; other payment system operators, such as Pay.UK (BACS, faster payments and cheque imaging), Visa, Mastercard, LINK, PEXA and Euroclear UK & International (CREST), continue to operate on their existing timelines. The bank said it will continue to work with these systems to “understand demand for additional settlement.”
Part of the future roadmap for RTGS includes the launch of a Synchronisation Lab, for which PEXA and LMS’s National Property Transaction Network have been selected. The lab has been set up to test business models for synchronising payments across the financial services sector. The two providers have been selected as part of a focus on property transactions.
