Colombia's central settlement system, the CUD or Sistema de Cuentas de Depósito, closed 2024 with 150 direct participants connected to its real-time gross settlement platform, according to the Banco de la República's Financial Infrastructure and Payment Instruments Report published in 2025. The figure marks a meaningful expansion from the 131 deposit account holders recorded in 2020, reflecting both banking sector evolution and the broadening of access to a wider range of financial entities.
The participant base spans five categories: 52 credit establishments, 74 securities and foreign exchange market intermediaries, seven financial market infrastructure operators, 14 entities of other institutional types, and three government and central bank accounts. This diversity distinguishes the CUD from many peer RTGS systems in Latin America, where participation typically concentrates among commercial banks.
Transaction values processed through the CUD have grown substantially in recent years. In 2023, the daily average value of settled transactions rose 28 percent year-over-year, followed by a further 17 percent increase in 2024. This two-year cumulative growth of nearly 50 percent reflects intensified activity in sell and buy-back transactions as well as greater use of the Banco de la República's liquidity absorption facility. Transaction volumes followed a different trajectory, growing 11 percent in 2023 before declining 2 percent in 2024, suggesting a shift toward fewer but larger-value settlements.
The CUD operates Monday through Friday from 07:00 to 20:00 Colombia time and has been in continuous operation since 2001. It serves as the final settlement layer for the country's broader payment ecosystem, processing net obligations from ACH Colombia, the securities depository DCV, and the central counterparty CRCC, which itself cleared 15 percent more transactions in 2024 than the previous year.
Colombia's payment landscape underwent a significant transformation in September 2025 with the full launch of Bre-B, the country's new instant retail payment system. Interconnecting 227 financial institutions at launch, Bre-B introduces free real-time account-to-account transfers and is expected to generate increased settlement activity through the CUD as adoption scales. The system represents the retail complement to the CUD's wholesale settlement role, mirroring the architecture seen in Brazil with STR and PIX or in India with RTGS and UPI.
A 2024 reserve requirement modification by the Banco de la República reduced CUD balances held by participants without impairing settlement efficiency, demonstrating the system's capacity to maintain operational stability under changing monetary policy conditions. For historical reference, the CUD processed a daily average of COP 56 trillion in 2021, representing 4.5 percent of annual GDP at the time.