Why Banking Systems Are Moving Toward 24/7 Settlement 

At 2:13 on a Sunday morning, Neha's AI assistant notices that one of her company's critical components is running low. It checks approved suppliers, compares prices and delivery times, finds a supplier that fits Neha's pre-set rules and places the order. The supplier accepts. The payment is made. 

By the time Neha wakes up, the transaction appears complete. But behind that apparently simple payment are other questions: when will the banks settle what they owe each other? Is sufficient liquidity available? Has the transaction passed the necessary risk checks? If it is cross-border, when will the currencies be exchanged and the final settlement completed? 

That is the real story of Always-On Finance. The banking day is disappearing. The financial infrastructure behind the money has to catch up. 

The World Is Already Moving 24/7 

For most of banking history, the financial system had a natural rhythm. Payments were processed during defined operating periods, settlement followed established cycles and many reconciliation and back-office activities were organised around the business day. 

The customer experience has changed much faster. India's UPI and Brazil's Pix have made instant payments available around the clock. FedNow in the United States operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Europe is also extending instant-payment infrastructure and cross-border connectivity. 

But not every part of the financial system has yet moved to the same timetable. 

The Bank of England, for example, is now working towards near-24x7 settlement for RTGS and CHAPS. It has already confirmed that CHAPS will begin its settlement day at 01:30 rather than 06:00 from September 2027, subject to final implementation arrangements, and is consulting on weekend settlement and further extensions later in the decade. 

Why does that matter when people can already make instant payments? Because instant payment and final settlement are not necessarily the same thing. 

When Fast Isn't Final 

Consider a familiar example: a card purchase. You tap your card, the transaction is approved and the merchant knows almost immediately that the payment has been authorised. But the authorisation is not the same as the final settlement between the participating banks. 

Different payment systems handle this in different ways. One common approach is Net Deferred Settlement (NDS). Payments are processed during a period, but the participating institutions do not settle every transaction individually. Instead, the system works out what each participant owes the others and settles the net amount at scheduled intervals. Suppose Bank A's customers send ₹100 crore to Bank B during the day, while Bank B's customers send ₹80 crore back. Rather than settling the full ₹180 crore of two-way flows individually, the system could settle the ₹20 crore net difference. That reduces the amount of liquidity participants need to keep available for settlement, while accepting that the final interbank settlement happens later. 

Another approach is Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS). Here, qualifying transactions are settled individually and with finality rather than accumulated and netted with others. 

The difference matters. 

NDS says: net the obligations and settle them later. RTGS says: settle each qualifying obligation individually. 

The Bank of England says that many UK retail payment systems today process customer payments continuously while their resulting net positions are settled later through RTGS. Over long weekends, the gap can stretch from Thursday evening to Tuesday morning (such as during Easter holidays). Extending RTGS settlement service (that currently operates from 5:15 am to 6:00 pm, with contingency extensions up to 8:00 pm) would reduce that window. 

This is one reason the move towards always-on finance is about more than making payment messages travel faster. The financial obligations created by those payments also need somewhere—and some time—to settle. 

When Friday Ends but the Payments Don't 

Imagine a large retailer having an exceptionally busy weekend. Customers keep paying, suppliers continue sending invoices, balances change constantly and its treasury team needs to know how much cash is available. 

The payment systems may continue processing those transactions. 

But if the underlying settlement process pauses for the weekend, the financial institution has to manage the gap. It may need more liquidity, closer monitoring of exposures and careful reconciliation when settlement resumes. This is exactly the kind of issue the Bank of England's proposed settlement-hour extensions are designed to address. The Bank notes that longer settlement hours could reduce the build-up of settlement risk and liquidity costs created when retail payment systems continue operating while net settlement in RTGS is unavailable. 

The point is not that today's systems are somehow broken. NDS can be efficient. RTGS can be robust. The question is whether those models remain optimal as the economy itself becomes more continuous. 

The Liquidity Problem Nobody Sees 

There is another challenge customers almost never see: liquidity. 

If payments and settlement obligations can arise at any time, banks need access to sufficient funds at any time. Too little liquidity can make it difficult to meet unexpected obligations. Too much can leave valuable funds sitting idle. 

The problem becomes more complicated when transactions cross borders, because different currencies, settlement systems and central-bank infrastructures are involved. 

This is one reason the BIS and central banks are exploring new settlement models and tokenised forms of central-bank and commercial-bank money. The potential benefit is not simply speed; it is the ability to manage settlement, collateral and liquidity more continuously. 

Ravi's Payment Has to Cross a Border 

Ravi runs an engineering business in Bengaluru and has just bought equipment from a supplier in Thailand. His company holds Indian rupees. The supplier wants Thai baht. Ravi can initiate the payment immediately, but the transaction still has to deal with foreign exchange, settlement and finality. This is why cross-border instant payments are harder than domestic ones: several pieces of the transaction have to work across different systems and currencies. 

Project Nexus is tackling one part of that problem by providing a standardised way for domestic instant-payment systems to connect. Instead of every country building a separate connection to every other country, a payment system can connect once to the Nexus framework and potentially reach the other participating systems. 

In 2025, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand incorporated Nexus Global Payments to take the project towards live implementation. The BIS says the model could allow cross-border payments to reach recipients within 60 seconds in most cases. 

For Ravi, the attraction is simple: a payment that is instant at home should not become slow merely because it crosses a border. But Nexus does not remove another problem. What happens when Ravi's rupees have to become baht? 

Rialto: Bringing FX and Settlement Closer Together 

This is the problem explored in Project Rialto, a BIS Innovation Hub experiment conducted with the Bank of France, the Bank of Italy, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. 

In simple terms, Rialto explored whether a cross-border payment could automatically trigger the currency conversion and bring the resulting payment and settlement steps into a more closely coordinated process. Instead of relying on a human trader or waiting hours for a foreign exchange desk to price a trade, Rialto uses an automated mathematical formula on a shared blockchain network. The moment a user sends a payment, the formula instantly calculates the exchange rate and executes the currency swap in milliseconds. This completely removes the timing gaps where currency values could fluctuate. That matters because the more separate steps a cross-border payment involves, the more hand-offs, timing gaps and potential friction it can create. 

Rialto's question was simple: can payment, currency conversion and settlement work less like a relay race and more like a coordinated process?  Rialto therefore takes the story one stage beyond Nexus. 

Nexus asks: how do instant-payment systems connect? 

Rialto asks: how do payment, FX and settlement work together once they are connected? 

Can the Whole Deal Happen at Once? 

Suppose Ravi's rupees are being converted into baht to pay his Thai supplier. 

In a conventional arrangement, the steps may happen separately. The foreign exchange is executed, the payment is processed and the relevant institutions complete their settlement obligations. That creates a possibility that one side completes its part while another part is still waiting. 

Atomic settlement changes the logic. The linked legs are treated as one transaction: either they all settle together, or the transaction does not complete. 

Ravi's rupees are not finally transferred unless the corresponding baht payment can also be completed. The supplier does not receive the baht while Ravi's side remains unfinished. That is what makes atomic settlement different from simply making settlement faster. It is not just "settle sooner." It is "settle together." 

And Then Comes Agorá 

If Nexus is about connecting domestic payment systems, and Rialto explores how payment, foreign exchange and settlement can work more closely together, Project Agorá takes the idea further. It is the BIS's most ambitious experiment yet in using tokenisation to rethink cross-border payments. The project brings together central banks from France, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Switzerland, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, along with a large group of regulated financial institutions. 

Today, a cross-border payment can pass through several institutions, each maintaining its own records and updating its own balances. That can mean multiple messages, checks and hand-offs before the transaction is complete - the instruction and the settlement do not always happen as one event.  

Agorá explores whether tokenization can bring them closer together. A token represents a digital version of a financial claim, together with the rules governing how that claim can be transferred. Agorá is exploring how tokenised commercial-bank deposits and tokenised wholesale central-bank money can work together on a shared programmable platform (where Central bank money, commercial bank money, and digital assets all live on a single, shared network). Commercial-bank deposits support the customer-facing payment, while wholesale central-bank money can provide the settlement layer between banks. This could allow the different legs of a cross-border transaction—including payment, currency conversion and interbank settlement—to be coordinated on the same platform and completed through atomic settlement: either all the linked steps succeed together, or none does.  

The payment and its settlement can become part of the same operation. 

Because the platform is programmable, some of the rules surrounding the payment could also travel with the transaction. Screening, compliance checks and other agreed conditions could be built into the process so that they are checked as part of execution rather than always being handled as separate steps. This is where atomic settlement becomes important. Atomic settlement means that linked parts of a transaction are completed together or not at all. In Agorá's case, the idea can extend across the end-to-end payment process. Instead of a traditional payment moving through a chain of messages and separate ledger updates, the system can coordinate the relevant steps synchronously. Once the transaction completes, the corresponding balances are updated across the participating institutions. 

The project is still experimental, and it is not yet a replacement for today's correspondent banking system. But it takes the idea of Always-On Finance one step further—not merely making existing processes available for longer hours but redesigning the transaction itself so that fewer things need to wait for the next step. 

Then the Buyer Doesn't Have to Be Awake. 

Go back to Neha. Her AI assistant does not care whether it is Sunday. It sees that an essential component is running low, finds an approved supplier, checks the rules and initiates the purchase. 

As agentic commerce develops, software agents could increasingly monitor inventory, buy supplies, manage subscriptions and execute routine corporate spending within limits defined by humans. 

That creates a new challenge for financial infrastructure. An AI agent may act at 2:13 a.m. on Sunday. It can compare options, check its instructions and initiate a transaction in seconds. 

But can payment, FX, settlement, liquidity and risk controls respond with the same continuity? Machines do not have banking hours. Neither does commerce. That is why the move towards always-on finance matters. The infrastructure is not just preparing for people who want to pay on a Sunday. It will increasingly have to support software acting for people at any hour of the day.  

Always-On Finance Needs Always-On Protection 

There is also a less comfortable side to faster settlement. The faster a transaction becomes final, the less time there may be to stop a fraudulent payment or correct an error. 

That means always-on finance also needs continuously operating risk controls. Fraud detection, authentication, liquidity monitoring, reconciliation and operational resilience cannot simply depend on a team returning to work on Monday morning. Project Agorá also points to a different approach: by enabling compliance and screening requirements to be embedded into a shared, programmable transaction environment, checks such as AML screening and fraud-related controls could become part of the payment process itself rather than separate steps performed later. 

Automation and AI will increasingly help identify unusual activity, manage exceptions and escalate cases that require human attention. The goal is not to remove every pause. It is to make the necessary pauses deliberate controls rather than accidental consequences of banking hours. 

No Closing Bell 

The shift is simple: Pay → Clear → Settle → Reconcile → Close 

is gradually becoming: Pay → Clear → Settle → Reconcile → Continue 

Not every system will operate continuously. But the direction is clear: the Bank of England is extending RTGS and CHAPS hours, while Nexus, Rialto and Agorá are tackling different parts of the same challenge—from connecting instant-payment systems to bringing payment, FX and settlement closer together. 

For years, the question was: How fast can money move? 

The next one is: How quickly—and safely—can the entire transaction become final? 

Pay. Exchange. Settle. Protect. Finish. — without waiting for Monday.