Central Bank of Iceland chooses SIA for payments overhaul
Planned to go live in 2018
The Central Bank of Iceland (CBI) has chosen Italian firm SIA to implement and support a new real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) and new instant payment platform.
These technology infrastructures developed by SIA, are planned to go live in 2018, and will replace CBI’s current mainframe-based real-time solutions for high and low-value payment systems, which have been operating since 2001. SIA will use its wholly-owned subsidiary Perago, based in Pretoria (South Africa), which specialises in central bank solutions.
Guðmundur Tómasson, CBI’s director of financial market infrastructure, says the deal means it can “co-operate closer with our Nordic neighbors in this field”.
SIA is also a provider for the central banks in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
CBI manages all interbank payments in the country. Despite the small population (c. 332,000), it processes up to one million payments per day with a peak of 160,000 per hour.
CBI will not split high and low-value payments, but according to SIA will implement a new model based on a single system which processes each type of payment (bank to bank, P2P or B2B) in a different way, while ensuring that all transactions can be exchanged using a single domestic message standard.
