The Central Bank of Iceland (CBI) has gone live with a new real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) and instant payment platform from infrastructure provider SIA.

CBI says it can now rely on a more strategic and modern infrastructure for its high and low-value payment systems, also enabling closer cooperation with other central banks.

The CBI manages all interbank payments in the country and currently processes a daily volume of transactions of up to 1 million payments, despite the country's small population of just over 365,000 inhabitants.

The new consolidated system has been developed in order to manage up to 5 million payments per day and each transaction is on average processed in less than 40 milliseconds, handling all types of payments - Bank to Bank, P2P, P2B and B2B.

Sturla Pálsson, director for the markets department of the Central Bank of Iceland, said: “An efficient and secure payment system is one of the pre-requisites for smooth, normal business transactions in a modern economy.

“We need to use the best available tools at all times, which is what we have with this implementation.”

Eugenio Tornaghi, marketing and sales director of SIA, said: “The successful go-live for this new interbank payment system confirms our strong partnership with central institutions to deliver secure, mission-critical and high-performance platforms, and to enable challenging digital transformation programmes in the payments ecosystem.”

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