On an average day payments exchanged among banks but not settled until the next day come to over $ billion. RTGS will, at the outset, eliminate about two-thirds of that overnight exposure. It will also give Australia a fully-fledged delivery-versuspayment system for transactions in debt securities. With banks and other payments providers, the RBA began building the RTGS system in 1995.
This has been a major undertaking - with a development cost across the industry of around $ million. The project is technically complex, but its biggest challenges have been reaching agreement on the architecture and rules for a system which all high-value payments providers will use on an equal and open basis.