This paper presents the results of a joint experiment involving Banca d’Italia and the Arab Regional Payments Clearing and Settlement Organization (ARPSCO), focusing on the settlement of cross‑currency instant payments across different technical platforms.
TIPS and Buna are the instant payment settlement platforms with multi-currency features operated by the two organizations respectively. Both platforms started with an initial investigative phase, in order to assess operational policies and the legal and technical implications of implementing a cross‑currency instant payment settlement service, i.e. one in which the debtor and creditor accounts are denominated in two different currencies both eligible for settlement on the platform.
For the purpose of the Proof of Concept (PoC), two representatives of the abovementioned market communities, namely Intesa Sanpaolo and Jordan Ahli Bank, participated in their respective capacities of Originator PSP and ultimate Beneficiary PSP for the corresponding currencies, i.e. the euro and the Jordanian dinar.
In line with building blocks 13 and 17 of the G20 global roadmap for enhancing cross-border payments (concerning the interlinking of payment systems), the natural evolution of these investigations was to explore possible options for providing the same type of cross-currency service in a cross-platform scenario, i.e. through the interoperability of different instant payment platforms.
The PoC described in this paper relates to the implementation of a cross-platform scenario involving TIPS and Buna.
