On 18 May, the Bank of England released a consultation paper outlining its next steps toward extending RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours beyond the already-announced early morning expansion. From September 2027, CHAPS will open at 01:30 instead of 06:00, Monday to Friday, extending the daily settlement window to 16.5 hours. The consultation now proposes adding Sunday settlement and certain UK bank holidays no earlier than 2029, with further extensions to 22-hour days by 2031. The Bank has publicly stated its ambition to move towards near 24x7 RTGS and CHAPS settlement around the turn of the decade, following a phased approach.
The direction is clear. The limited operating hours of key payment infrastructures that facilitate cross-border payments, particularly RTGS systems, constrain the times when payments can be processed, ultimately leading to increased liquidity costs and settlement risk. The G20's cross-border payments programme has identified extending and aligning RTGS hours as a priority building block for reducing friction. An extension of RTGS operating hours across jurisdictions could help address current obstacles, thereby increasing the speed of cross-border payments and reducing liquidity costs and settlement risks.
For traditional finance, this matters. For institutional crypto brokerages, it matters differently.
The operational reality for a desk executing large bilateral OTC tickets, say, a $50 million crypto trade for a hedge fund or family office, is that client demand doesn't observe weekends. Markets are continuous. A family office wanting to rebalance exposure on Saturday morning or a fund needing to deploy capital before a Monday open expects execution. The brokerage can execute the crypto leg: blockchain settlement runs 24/7/365. But the fiat leg cannot settle until traditional rails reopen.
Settlement time is 08:00 UTC daily, excluding weekends and holidays. Trades after 08:00 UTC are settled at 10:00 UTC on the next business day. Weekends are Saturdays and Sundays. This is the structure most institutional OTC arrangements operate within. Even with Sunday CHAPS settlement in 2029, Saturday remains closed. Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and Easter Sunday are explicitly excluded from the Bank's proposed extension.
The gap creates compounding risks. Settlement delays and insufficient liquidity carry risk, including credit risk. Settlement risk is the risk of losing payments made or securities delivered to the defaulting party before the default was detected. In OTC crypto markets, this manifests as assets sitting exposed, either on exchange custody during execution windows or in intermediary accounts awaiting fiat clearance. The FTX collapse made that risk glaring, and the $1.4 billion Bybit hack reinforced it. The broader patterns of 2025 showed where counterparty exposure became a first-order operational risk.
The Bank of England's consultation acknowledges the broader shift. The Bank is working towards delivery of a Synchronisation service that will enable RT2 to connect to other external ledgers, including those built on distributed ledger technology, allowing conditional settlement of funds in RTGS against assets on external ledgers. The delivery of synchronisation in combination with existing omnibus accounts, and alongside extended settlement hours, will be important enablers in supporting innovation in payments and digital assets. The Bank is also committing to launch a live synchronisation service, targeted for 2028.
This is significant infrastructure. The Synchronisation Lab, now underway, has selected 18 organisations to take part, with use cases including collateral optimisation, Payment vs Payment for cross-border spot FX and Delivery vs Payment for tokenised securities. The Bank and FCA's joint vision statement on tokenisation, released alongside the RTGS consultation, signals regulatory intentionality. UK financial firms can adopt tokenisation and distributed ledger technology with greater confidence. Tokenisation is the process of creating a digital representation of a real-world asset, such as a share, bond or unit of currency, on a digital ledger.
But the timeline remains the problem. The synchronisation service targets 2028 for production. The first weekend settlement window for CHAPS arrives no earlier than 2029. Full 22-hour daily coverage comes no earlier than 2031. For an operations head managing settlement risk today, these are useful waypoints, not solutions.
The practical constraints are structural. Institutional clients may require same-day liquidity to respond to market shifts, manage FX exposure, or redeploy capital, but sluggish settlement processes can freeze capital. Fiat leg settlement, or settlement of a transaction between an exchange and a bank, can take from two to five business days. Even same-day settlement depends on the trade being captured within banking hours, on a banking day, in a jurisdiction whose RTGS is open. A Saturday afternoon execution in London faces a 40-hour wait for Monday settlement, longer if a bank holiday follows.
The response from institutional desks has been predictable. A growing number of regulated off-exchange custody solutions now make this possible in practice. They allow institutions to hold assets with a custodian while trading on exchanges, with balances mirrored and settlement automated. Some desks use stablecoins as an intermediate settlement layer to bridge fiat gaps. Others accept the exposure, pricing it into spreads or limiting weekend execution to smaller tickets.
None of these are structural solutions. They are operational workarounds that manage risk without eliminating it.
The Bank's consultation explicitly frames extended hours as supporting "a safe and resilient multi-money ecosystem in which different forms of money, including central bank money, commercial bank money, tokenised deposits, and stablecoins, can coexist and interoperate." The vision is directionally correct. Central bank money remains, in the Bank's words, "the ultimate risk-free settlement asset." But for that asset to anchor digital asset settlement, it needs to be available when digital assets trade.
The consultation closes on 10 August 2026. For operations heads at institutional crypto brokerages, the relevant question isn't whether to respond, it's how to manage the years between now and when fiat infrastructure catches up. That means continued reliance on parallel settlement infrastructure: custody arrangements that minimise exchange exposure, tri-party structures that manage counterparty risk, and settlement workflows that can function when traditional rails cannot.
The Bank of England is moving in the right direction. The gap it is closing is real. But "near 24/7" is not 24/7/365, and the remaining windows, Saturdays, Christmas, Easter, are precisely when reduced liquidity and elevated volatility make unhedged exposure most costly. Until those windows close, the infrastructure problem remains operational, not regulatory.
