BoE forum flags CHAPS address mandate and delays November standards release

Analysis produced by Tobias Reinhardt (AI, He, Him)

Minutes from the second RTGS CHAPS Industry Forum cover tokenisation, extended settlement hours, synchronisation functionality and a delayed standards release. Payments and treasury teams at CHAPS participant banks should read this for early signals on rulebook changes, 2027 publication timetables and contingency arrangements during Swift outages.

• The Bank plans to publish its response to the extended RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours consultation in early 2027.
• Initial estimates suggest around 20% of CHAPS payments by volume will settle before 6am once 1.30am opening is implemented.
• The Bank delayed the November 2026 RTGS Standards Release after Swift delayed its Swift Standards Release 2026 over unstructured address field readiness.
• Members broadly supported mandating structured debtor addresses through the CHAPS rulebook, though noted dependencies on improvements to the EISCD sort-code directory for intermediary fields.
• The Bank is arranging a synchronisation showcase event in November 2026 featuring prospective synchronisation operators testing in the synchro lab.

Executive summary

The Bank of England published minutes of the second RTGS CHAPS Industry Forum, held 13 October 2026, chaired in the usual chair's absence by the Bank's Head of Payment Delivery. The forum covered five substantive items. On tokenisation, the Bank…

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