A property completion has to happen today and the high-value rail is not available. Walk me through what you do.
Answer
Short answer
You cannot substitute the rail, so the work is triage, finality and communication - deciding which payments genuinely must settle today, whether any alternative gives the receiver the same certainty, and what you tell the customer before the window closes.
RTGS outages are settlement-risk events, not ordinary downtime. Good RTGS answers explain queueing, liquidity, contingency rails, customer communication, and settlement finality. Weak RTGS answers route around the rail without asking whether settlement finality is preserved. Strong settlement finality reasoning says which obligations can wait, which need manual escalation, and which cannot be represented as complete until RTGS confirms final settlement.
RTGS contingency planning should be rehearsed before the day the rail is unavailable.
Was this answer helpful?
Likely follow-ups
- What would you have to agree with the scheme or the central bank in advance for your contingency to be usable on the day?
- How do you prevent a payment being sent twice when it was queued manually and then replayed automatically?
- Which payments would you deliberately not attempt, and who is entitled to make that call?
- How does your settlement account funding change on a day the rail runs late into the evening?
Related questions
- Your nostro reconciliation shows a break this morning. How do you investigate it, and how do you know when the money has actually gone?hardAlso on settlement-finality6 min
- Your algorithm is a third of the way through a large sell order and the liquidity on the other side disappears. What should it do?hardAlso on liquidity6 min
- Your payments run over a batch rail and the business wants to move to an instant one. What changes?hardAlso on liquidity6 min
- You are asked to design a product that does not exist, and the setup is missing details you would need in real life. Do you point that out?mediumSame kind of round: scenario5 min