Eurosystem Collateral Management System

TARGET T2, EURO1, and STEP2-T will close for Good Friday and Easter Monday on April 3 and 6, while RT1 and TIPS continue 24/7 instant settlement through the four-day window at their current combined rate of over 10 million daily transactions. With six months of IPR sending mandate compliance behind the market, the Easter period offers a practical measure of how effectively instant rails now absorb payment flows that previously depended on batch settlement schedules.

The ECB plans to release the digital euro technical rulebook this summer so terminal manufacturers and payment developers can build infrastructure before EU legislation passes, followed by a twelve-month pilot in the second half of 2027 and potential issuance around 2029.

From March 30, tokenised securities issued through DLT-enabled CSDs and settled via T2S become eligible as Eurosystem collateral. The ECB's Appia roadmap, published March 11, targets a fully integrated European tokenised market infrastructure by 2028, with the Pontes DLT settlement bridge scheduled for Q3 2026.

Industry surveys reveal that only a third of payment service providers are fully prepared for the November 2026 SWIFT CBPR+ structured postal address mandate, while nearly half of banks report that their customer address data remains in legacy unstructured formats. The readiness gap raises operational risk for cross-border payment processing across every major RTGS system that connects to the SWIFT network.

Two new workstreams under the ECB's Rulebook Development Group will develop technical specifications governing how the digital euro interacts with existing point-of-sale hardware and cash machines, with expert applications open until April 10 as the project enters its preparation phase ahead of a planned 2027 pilot.

The draft, released in early March 2026 with comments invited until April 6, 2026, targets the growing volume of digital payment scams involving amounts under Rs 50,000. In a notable departure from existing rules, the RBI has indicated that first-time victims may receive compensation even in cases where one-time passwords

EBA Clearing's RT1 instant payment service reported daily volumes rising steadily through 2025, averaging 6 million transactions per day by November and reaching 6.7 million on weekdays. The service recorded a single-day peak of 9.

Separately, India and Israel agreed in February 2026 to enable UPI payments in Israel through cooperation between NPCI International and MASAV, Israel's interbank payments operator.

Five Luxembourg banks including BGL BNP Paribas, Bil, Banque Raiffeisen, Spuerkeess and Post Luxembourg have joined the European Payments Initiative, with Wero P2P payments set to go live by the end of June 2026. The existing Payconiq payment scheme will be fully replaced by Wero by September 2026.

Nexus Global Payments, the entity formed by five central banks to operationalize the BIS Project Nexus cross-border instant payments platform, has appointed a joint venture between Malaysia's PayNet and Singapore's NETS as its technical operator after a competitive global tender. Working with AWS and Endava, the platform now targets 2027 go-live.