New Zealand’s central bank launches new market infrastructure with Italy’s Sia
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), the country’s central bank, has launched a new payment settlement system for its Asia-Pacific (APAC) customers with Italian IT company Sia.
RBNZ will use the new infrastructure to serve a collection of 57 banks, custodians, registries and brokers with roughly 600 users across New Zealand, Australia and Asia.
“The extent of change is significant,” says RBNZ
For Sia, a firm which managed roughly 14 billion institutional services’ transactions in 2018, this is the first delivery and implementation of its market infrastructure in the APAC region.
The bank is replacing its inter-bank settlement system and central securities depository – called the Exchange Settlement Account System (ESAS) and Central Securities Depository system (NZClear) – with Sia’s solution, which it calls “a far more modern” system for managing day-to-day interactions.
Read more: Air Academy Federal Credit Union selects Fiserv DNA
“The extent of change is significant,” says RBNZ’s assistant governor and chief financial officer (CFO) Mike Wolyncewicz.
“Every day, transactions with a value of more than $30 billion are settled, so there has been a focus on getting this right, and not rushing out a replacement until we were confident that it was ready,” Wolyncewicz adds.
The new system is based on Sia’s real-time gross settlement (RTGS) and central securities depository (CSD) applications, which the bank says is used by several other central institutions across Europe, Africa, Middle East and North America.
This includes Denmark’s central bank, Danmarks Nationalbank, which selected the same RTGS solution in September 2018.
Read next: Banking Circle nabs first banking licence from Luxembourg regulators
