Milan and Reykjavik, April 11 2017 – The Central Bank of Iceland (CBI) has chosen SIA - European hi-tech company, leader in payment infrastructures and services - to implement and support the new real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) and the new instant payment platform.
These technology infrastructures developed by SIA, planned to go live in 2018, will replace CBI's current mainframe-based real-time solutions for high and low-value payment systems, which have been operating since 2001. SIA will use its wholly-owned subsidiary Perago, based in Pretoria (South Africa), specialized in central bank solutions.
Central Bank of Iceland manages all interbank payments in the country. Despite the small population, it processes a quite significant daily volume of transactions: up to 1 million payments with a peak of 160,000 per hour. CBI has decided to move towards a more strategic, modern and cost-effective infrastructure.
CBI will be able to benefit from seamless integration among Perago's RTGS, Instant Payment and Payhub solutions. Furthermore, CBI will differentiate itself from standard models that traditionally split high and low-value payments, by implementing a new model based on a single system which processes each type of payment (Bank to Bank, P2P or B2B) in a different way, while ensuring that all transactions can be exchanged using a single domestic message standard. This new approach puts CBI at the forefront of the payment system infrastructure evolution.