the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced the date for the launching of RTGS 24×7. The Reserve Bank had announced in the statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies dated October 09, 2020, that the Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) will be available round the clock on all days of the year. Accordingly, RTGS 24x7x365 will be launched with effect from 00:30 hours on December 14, 2020.
Currently, RTGS is available for customers from 7.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. on all working days of a week, except the second and fourth Saturdays of every month.
RTGS, which began its operations on March 26, 2004 with a soft launch involving four banks, presently handles 6.35 lakh transactions daily for a value of ₹4.17 lakh crore across 237 participant banks. The average ticket size for RTGS in November 2020 was ₹57.96 lakh making it a truly large-value payment system. RTGS uses ISO 20022 format which is the best-in-class messaging standard for financial transactions.
The RTGS system is primarily meant for high-value transactions. It happens on a real-time basis. The minimum amount to be remitted through RTGS is Rs 2 lakh with no maximum limit.
The feature of positive confirmation for credit to beneficiary accounts is also available in RTGS.
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Round the clock availability of RTGS will provide extended flexibility to businesses for effecting payments and will enable the introduction of additional settlement cycles in ancillary payment systems. This can also be leveraged to enhance operations of Indian financial markets and cross-border payments.
Real-Time Gross Settlement can be explained as a system where there is the continuous and real-time settlement of fund-transfers, individually on a transaction by transaction basis (without netting). ‘Real Time’ means the processing of instructions at the time they are received; ‘Gross Settlement’ means that the settlement of funds transfer instructions occurs individually.
