The Bank of England and Accenture (NYSE: ACN) have completed the transformation of the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service, a significant component of the UK’s financial infrastructure, enhancing its resilience, access, functionality, and delivering new foundations for tech advancements.
With the goal of developing a modern, wholesale payments infrastructure in the UK, the Bank of England partnered with Accenture to rebuild the digital core of the RTGS service—a system “that underpins financial stability by securely settling payments between financial institutions instantly and supporting an average of £800 billion worth of transactions every day.”
As part of the program, Accenture delivered a “core ledger and settlement engine built on cloud-native modern architecture underpinned by end-to-end automation to improve interoperability, speed, and scalability.”
The system ensures smooth processing of “important payments between institutions.”
The renewed RTGS core platform went “live on 28 April 2025, and in three months since launch, it has successfully processed over 9.4 million transactions valued at £35.2 trillion – with the highest single day processing 295,000 transactions.”
With faster onboarding features and external APIs to “access data more easily, it can accommodate more participants than before, allowing for broader access to more financial entities and a more diverse ecosystem.”
As part of the transformation, Accenture also delivered “a range of enabling components of the new system, including enhanced automation that runs more than 40,000 tests daily.”
The platform, built to high technology specification, “includes zero data loss recovery and “failover” features, that can quickly switch critical operations over to a temporary backup system should any issues arise.”
Accenture also helped to deploy monitoring tools “for visibility into daily operations and worked with the Bank of England to enhance knowledge and expertise, implementing Agile practices at scale, sustaining the project’s long-term value.”
The Bank of England appointed Accenture as “the delivery partner of the RTGS renewal program in 2020.”
As covered, Accenture is a global professional services company “that helps the world’s businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale.”
Technology is at the core of change today, and they “are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with ecosystem relationships.”
They combine their strength in “technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability.”
Their range of services, solutions and assets “across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with their culture of shared success and commitment to creating value, enable them to help clients reinvent and build lasting relationships.”
