The role of TIPS for the future payments landscape
Speech by Ignazio Visco
Governor of the Bank of Italy
Virtual conference "Future of Payments in Europe"
Deutsche Bundesbank
27 November 2020
I wish to thank President Weidmann and Mr Balz for their kind invitation to this
conference on "The Future of Payments in Europe". Payments play a crucial role in
the functioning of the economy and in our daily lives. They allow every citizen, every
day, to participate in civil life and are essential to the well-functioning of domestic and
international trade.
Today, technological innovation and the development of digital technologies are
radically reshaping the demand and supply of new forms of payment. This change
cannot be left unguided, as it must be ensured that payments are efficient, inclusive
and safe. Central banks are at the forefront of this innovation process.
The Eurosystem's retail payments strategy aims to foster innovative and cost efficient
payments. Providing the possibility to make easy, instant, efficient and safe payments
to any counterparty, anywhere in Europe, is the cornerstone of this strategy.
Within this framework, the Eurosystem has launched a powerful platform for the
continuous settlement of instant payments: TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS).1
In what follows, I will talk about the characteristics of this platform and its possible role
in the future European payments landscape.
TIPS: principles, characteristics and architecture
The TIPS project started in June 2017 (slide 1). In launching TIPS, the Eurosystem aimed
to provide a pan-European framework for the settlement of instant payments in central
bank money, with the objective of allowing citizens and firms to make payments via their
banks or other payment service providers anywhere in the euro area within a matter of
seconds. At the same time, the Eurosystem had the ambitious goal of positioning itself
at the frontier of the digital revolution, by developing innovative, customer-friendly,
instant retail payment solutions.
The Bank of Italy is one of the four national central banks - known as "the 4CB"- that
have been implementing market and payment infrastructures in the euro area since
the introduction of the euro. Among the many projects we have dealt with, we have
recently been entrusted with the development and operational management of TIPS.
The development and testing of the new system took just over one year and, at the
end of November 2018, the TIPS service started to operate. In addition to the tight
schedule, the TIPS project was particularly challenging because of its interdependence
with the TARGET2-T2S Consolidation project, which started in 2017 and is still going on,
and because of its highly innovative profile, which relies on high-tech solutions.
In its design, a number of principles were defined (slide 2). First, TIPS had to be based on
the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) Scheme - i.e. the standard for pan-European
instant payments developed by the European Payments Council at the request of the
Euro Retail Payments Board - and had to offer the final and irrevocable settlement of
instant payments in central bank money, every day of the year. Accordingly, TIPS was
developed as an extension of TARGET2: in order to join TIPS, institutions must fulfil the
same eligibility criteria as they do for their participation in TARGET2.
Second, TIPS had to operate on a full cost-recovery and not-for-profit basis, with a
very competitive pricing scheme and a high reachability. And, thirdly, although TIPS
was primarily designed for instant payment settlements in euro, it had to be a
multicurrency system. Thanks to this feature, TIPS is currently attracting considerable interest
in the community of central banks.
Working on a full cost-recovery basis, the price per transaction was set at 0.20 cents
(€0.002); this is the only cost for banks, as TIPS does not require any entry or
accountmaintenance fees (slide 3). Underlying TIPS is also the requirement that the whole
sequence of individual steps needed to carry out an instant payment transaction be
completed within a maximum of 10 seconds. TIPS fully satisfies this requirement: the
typical execution time (the "latency") is actually well below the 10 seconds threshold, in
the order of less than 5 seconds for 99 per cent of the transactions.
The main features of TIPS are its high processing capacity (i.e. the possibility to
process 500 payments per second - 2.000 at peak rate - and more than 40 million
payments a day) and the scalability (i.e. the possibility to process an increasing volume
of transactions without modifying the architecture of the system). The settlement
engine is able to process very high transactional volumes of payments. Distributed
software architecture, self-healing capabilities and the redundancy of the hardware
provide high availability and resilience: TIPS can operate on a continuous 24/7/365
basis, unmanned outside normal working hours and, in the event of a disaster, the
recovery time objective is limited to a maximum of 15 minutes. The ability to function
independently contributes to the very low running costs, because no staff are required
out of hours.
It is worth noting that the perimeter of TIPS is limited to the interactions between
the institutions participating in TIPS (banks or automated clearing houses), which
settle their payments in central bank money (slide 4). The communication between the
actual originator and the beneficiary of a payment (i.e. the individuals or institutions
transferring funds between each other) and their banks is outside the scope of TIPS
and is independently handled by each participating bank or automated clearing house,
using its own interface with its customers.
TIPS is a public service that does not compete with market solutions, but rather facilitates
their development by ensuring the interoperability of systems and the pan-European
reachability of customers. As an interbank settlement infrastructure, it is flexible and
neutral with respect to different technology standards adopted by the market, for
example for initiating a mobile payment at the point of sale or executing a
person-toperson money transfer. In this respect, TIPS could also support the development of both
existing and new instant payment solutions such as those based on the "tokenisation"
of payment cards.
But what really makes TIPS unique and different from any other settlement platform is
its distributed architecture in all layers, from application to infrastructure (slide 5). This
architecture is based on "industry standard" and open-source software and is designed
to ensure very high levels of stability, making service interruptions and software bugs
very unlikely. In order to identify, mitigate and manage cyber risks, TIPS is implemented
in compliance with international cyber-resilience standards and guidance.
The high availability of the system is achieved by using an architecture based on
"redundant servers": all the servers operate (currently in two different sites) by
processing, at any given moment, the very same input flow of messages. One instance
is "active", i.e. provides the service, while the other servers stand ready to take over the
processing in the event of the failure of the active one or in case of unavailability of
one of the processing sites.
The presence of redundant servers allows the settlement engine to process payments
exclusively "in memory". This avoids creating bottlenecks in the processing flow and
makes it possible for TIPS to be very fast and achieve system resilience. It must be
emphasised that this architecture differs from distributed-ledger systems (such as
those, based on a block chain) which need to generate trust and consensus among a
distributed community by means of an expensive and energy-intensive global validation
process. In the case of TIPS, the recognition and guarantee of the transactions comes
from the trust provided by the Eurosystem (the key task of a central bank).
This also allows TIPS to be "green". As shown in a recent research, the TIPS carbon
footprint per transaction for the year 2019 is a very small fraction of the amount of
CO2
emitted by other distributed-ledger-based networks during 2018.2 The reason is that,
absent the need to generate trust and consensus among all the network participants,
there is no energy dissipation.
TIPS and the future landscape for payments
In September 2020, the European Commission adopted a Retail Payments Strategy for
the European Union (EU) that sets a number of targets: removing market fragmentation,
promoting market-driven innovation in finance and addressing new challenges and risks
associated with digital finance, whilst ensuring technological neutrality.3
This strategy aims at making the use of digital and instant payment the "new normal"
solution across the EU. At the same time, it recognises the need to foster innovative,
competitive and highly secure retail payments markets which, in turn, must rely on
efficient and interoperable infrastructures, open to all players. Finally, it underlines the
importance of achieving faster and more affordable cross-border payments involving
non-EU countries, including remittances.
To implement the European vision on retail payments, the Eurosystem must overcome
the fragmentation of clearing and settlement services and enable customers to use
instant payment at the point of interaction (in store, e-commerce, peer-to-peer). More
specifically, the Eurosystem will have to ensure a pan-European reachability for instant
payments and support innovative retail payment solutions.
With the aim of achieving pan-European reachability for instant payments, last July the
Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) approved a set of measures known
as the "Pan-European reachability package" (slide 6).4 All payment service providers
which have adhered to the SCT Inst scheme and are reachable in TARGET2 should also
become reachable in a TIPS central bank money liquidity account, either as a participant
or as a reachable party (i.e. through the account of another participant). At the same
time, all automated clearing houses are required to migrate their technical accounts from
TARGET2 to TIPS in order to offer instant payments. The Eurosystem will discuss with
payment service providers and automated clearing houses whether a migration window
is needed for this purpose.
The ultimate goal of the "package" is to enable European citizens to make electronic
payments in euro to and from any country in real time, both in person and online. Enabling
the reachability of all payment service providers in SEPA is indeed a pre-condition for
the development of a pan-European instant payments system. However, their success
ultimately hinges on the experience of end-users. User-friendly, hassle-free end-user
solutions are of the essence.
In order to support banks and other payment service providers in offering end-user
solutions for instant payments, TIPS will therefore be complemented by the Mobile Proxy
Look-up (MPL) service. MPL will be an optional functionality that will enable a bank that
receives the request from one of its customers to execute an instant payment in favour
of a beneficiary identified with a proxy (e.g. a mobile number), to retrieve from a central
repository the beneficiary IBAN needed to initiate the payment in TIPS.
The high potential of TIPS can be exploited in several directions. It provides an
infrastructure for instantaneous private transactions, but could also be used to increase
the efficiency of public payments. Its use as a means to provide European citizens with a
fast and safe digital euro is currently under consideration. And it is a solution available to
help overcoming the current unsatisfactory status of cross-border payments.
Government payments represent a critical mass of financial transactions (slide 7).
Governmental usage of instant payments would generate benefits in terms of reduced
settlement times and cost. It could also promote a change in preferences by end-users,
encouraging the adoption of real-time innovative instruments for a wide range of
transactions. As Treasurer of the Italian Government, we are reviewing the IT procedures
for public payments in order to make it possible in the future to use TIPS for the instant
payments of the Italian public administration.
The ECB recently published a report on the issuance of a central bank digital currency
(CBDC) from the perspective of the Eurosystem.5 The report offers a preliminary analysis
of potential solutions for the technical implementation of a digital euro with regard to
the back-end infrastructure and end-user access solutions. According to the report, a
retail CBDC could be based on deposit accounts with the central bank (slide 8). This paves
the way for exploiting the usability, speed and cost-efficiency of TIPS, also in light of the
fact that its high scalability may permit the processing of one billion transactions per day
and the management of hundreds of millions of accounts.
TIPS is by design a multi-currency platform (slide 9). This feature signals that the
Eurosystem does not only aim to provide yet another market infrastructure, but has the
ambition of supporting the market in promoting closer cooperation, even with non-euro
central banks. In April 2020, the Riksbank concluded an agreement with the Eurosystem
to use the TIPS technical platform for the settlement of Swedish krona and is currently
working with the Bank of Italy and the ECB to implement the so-called RIX-INST instant
payment service, with a plan to go live in May 2022. This development gave rise to
the idea of exploiting the common instant payment infrastructure in order to provide a
cross-currency solution for instant payments. This solution will initially involve only the
euro and krona communities but, in the near future, it will of course be available for all
other currencies joining TIPS.
Recently, TIPS also played a prominent role in a trial launched by SWIFT to test fast global
transactions.6 The trial involved a group of 19 banks from 13 markets and the results
were impressive, with settlement times of less than 60 seconds for payments in euro. The
fastest payment settled was initiated in Singapore and reached the beneficiary in Spain,
via Germany, in 41 seconds. This proved the potential of TIPS to mitigate and address
the key challenges faced by cross-border payments with regard to speed and access to
payment systems.
During the 2020 Saudi Arabian Presidency, the Group of Twenty (G20) has made
enhancing cross-border payments a priority.7 The Financial Stability Board (FSB) was
asked, in coordination with the relevant stakeholders, to define a three-stage process
and to develop a roadmap to make these payments faster, cheaper, more transparent
and inclusive. The roadmap identifies five areas as focal points for action, ranging from
implementing international guidance and principles for cross-border payments, to
improving access to payment systems.
Next year the Italian G20 Presidency will remain committed to enhancing the efficiency
of cross-border payments. It will do so by targeting the focus areas where digitalisation
is posing challenges. One of these areas concerns the technical and operational
improvements to existing domestic and international payment infrastructures needed
for cross-border payments. TIPS has the potential to support the business cases and the
minimum requirements that shared or interoperable infrastructures will have to meet to
provide the settlement of cross-border payments.
* * *
The Eurosystem has set out a comprehensive strategy to respond to the transformation of
the European payments landscape. The promotion of pan-European payment solutions
and the development of instant, efficient and safe payments in the entire euro area are
crucial building blocks of this strategy.
The Bank of Italy's commitment to fostering the transition towards a more digital
economy is unwavering. The initiatives aiming at promoting technological innovation in
the financial sector and in the payments system have been, and will continue to be, ever
stronger.
Important innovations are underway in TIPS to allow users to carry out transactions in
real time using mobile devices and to significantly expand the number of intermediaries
connected to it, in line with the indications of the European Commission and the
Eurosystem. We are currently co-operating with the ECB and the euro area national
central banks in assessing the potential of TIPS as a possible technical solution for a
digital euro.
TIPS is a multi-currency platform, with the capability to process other currencies as well
as the euro. The agreement concluded with Riksbank last April represents a starting point
for broader initiatives, which may ultimately result in interconnecting other currencies
and other currency areas. Fostering a resilient and innovative payments market, aimed
at strengthening confidence and trust in the euro, is certainly key for the welfare of all
European citizens. Widespread benefits for all countries can be reaped worldwide by
delivering faster, cheaper, more transparent and more inclusive cross-border payment
services.
To conclude, I would like once again to underline the public nature of TIPS. Not only is
it an inclusive, efficient and sustainable infrastructure but it also incorporates, by design,
the objective of making instantaneous payments the "new normal" in a world that is so
rapidly, and in several ways so dramatically, changing.

SLIDES

TIPS: from a vision to a product
Key decision TIPS Project challenges
Challenging
time-tomarket
Time and technical
dependencies
Innovative High Tech
Solution
The decision of the ECB Governing Council triggered
the start of the realisation phase of the TIPS Project,
whose duration was just 17 months.
1
TIPS Principles
Instant payments
24/7/365 Supports participants
settlement in Central
in complying with the
operating hours
Bank Money
SCT Inst scheme
Same participation
Operated on a full
Multi-currency
criteria as for TARGET2
costrecovery basis
technical capability
2
TIPS Design
HIGH VOLUMES AVAILABILITY & RESILIENCE
Operating 24/7/365. The Recovery Time
TIPS is able to process 500 payments per
Objective in the event of a major failure is
second (2,000 at peak rate), 43.2 million
payments a day. 15 minutes.
LOW COST
LOW LATENCY
TIPS technical architecture is conceived to
Overall response time per transaction
keep cost per transaction as low as possible
below 5 seconds.
(0.2 euro cents).
3
The settlement of an instant payment in TIPS
T1
T2
TIPS Latency = T1 + T2
TIPS Architecture: key features
VERY FAST
Because of the high use of
GREEN
in-memory processing
According to a Bank of Italy study, the
(with very limited use of
environmental impact of TIPS
persistence).
significantly lower than that of otheris
systems based on distributed ledger
technology (e.g. the Bitcoin network).
RESILIENT
Resilience is achieved by
using redundant servers
The results shows a emission
CO2e
that process the very same
value per single transactions of only
input flow.
0,004g
CO2e.
STRAIGHTFORWARD
Thanks to a lean and
streamlined design and
implementation.
5
Current challenges and future-oriented solutions
Pan-European reachability package
Mobile Proxy Look-up service
The ECB's Governing Council approved in July
The MPL service supports PSPs in offering P2P
this year a set of measures (known as
payment solutions to initiate instant payments
"PanEuropean reachability package").
across SEPA using mobile devices.
The package will ensure that all PSPs will be The MPL service allows participants to retrieve
reachable across the chain, irrespective of which beneficiary data required to address a payment
ACH (or TIPS) they will be using for instant by providing the mobile phone number of the
payments. beneficiary.
6
A business case: speeding up Government payments
Adopting SCT Inst for public payments would provide several benefits
to Government, Households and Firms
For Government For Households and Firms
• Reduction of settlement • 24/7/365 availability
times (G2P)
• Real-time payments (P2G)
• Timely management of failed
• Potential integration with
payments
mobile services and
• Real-time collection (P2G) Request-To-Pay
Government payments would provide a critical mass
• spreading the culture of innovative payments
• accelerating the return on IT investments made by mkt participants
7
€-CBDC: a digital euro based on TIPS architecture?
An account-based digital euro may be implemented by
leveraging the very high scalability of TIPS technical
architecture.
Processing one billion transactions per day and managing hundreds of
millions of accounts without modifying the architecture of the system.
8
TIPS: a solution for cross-border payments beyond euro area
Multi-currency capability
Enhancing cross-border payments
TIPS may play a crucial role ensuring
TIPS is a multicurrency system. Other currencies
could be supported besides the euro. interoperability with other international fast
payment infrastructures.
TIPS is ready to welcome Riksbank. TIPS offers opportunities for the development
of payment solutions for cross-border
Go-live date:
payments (e.g. SWIFT gpi).
23 May 2022
Current volume:
A cross-currency solution in TIPS is under
1.8 millions payments/day
(July 2020)
consideration by Riksbank, ECB and Banca
Expected volume:
d'Italia.
2.7 millions payments/day
(November 2022)
Expected migration end date:
30 November 2022
9
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