Bank of England Maps a Path to Near-24/7 Settlement — And Stablecoins Forced the Clock

The Bank of England has been operating its central settlement rails on the same general schedule since the 1990s: weekdays only, twelve hours a day, no weekends, no holidays. On May 18, 2026, in a consultation paper that arrived alongside the FCA's joint tokenisation vision, the Bank formally accepted that this schedule is no longer tenable. The document — "Extending RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours: next steps towards near 24x7 settlement" — sets out a phased roadmap from today's 12x5 architecture to a near-continuous 23x7 operating window by around the turn of the decade. The pacing argument the Bank uses out loud, for the first time in an operational document of this kind, is that stablecoins and tokenised deposits have changed the competitive baseline for what wholesale settlement is allowed to be.

Sunday settlement, and the new BoE roadmap

CHAPS today settles weekdays 06:00-18:00. That is a 12-hour daily window, five days a week — call it 60 operating hours out of 168 in a week. The Bank's February 2026 policy statement already committed to bringing the daily start forward to 01:30 BST from September 2027, which alone takes the schedule to 16.5 hours x 5 days (82.5 hours/week). The May 18 consultation proposes the next layer: from a target date of "not before 2029," operate 16.5 hours x 6 days (Sun-Fri), with the same 01:30-18:00 window on Sundays and bank holidays, excluding Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and Easter Sunday. That step would push the weekly schedule to roughly 99 hours.

The proposed third step — "not before 2031" — extends the weekday-and-Sunday window to 22 hours, building the schedule to "22x6" (132 hours weekly). The long-term ambition the Bank now writes in plain text is "near 24x7" — defined as at least 23 hours x 7 days, with a short daily maintenance window — around the turn of the decade. That puts the Bank's settlement schedule, by 2030 or so, in roughly the same operating envelope as the on-chain stablecoin and tokenised-deposit rails that already settle continuously.

The operational pieces under the roadmap are non-trivial. CHAPS participants — the major UK banks and some overseas branches — have to staff and supervise an extended window without weakening the resilience controls that make Bank-of-England-money settlement different from commercial-bank money. The Bank explicitly flags governance, liquidity management, and operational resilience as the constraints that will determine whether each step happens on the proposed dates or slips. The phrase "not before" is doing important work: it is the floor, not the target.

The stablecoin pressure the Bank now says out loud

The substantive shift in this consultation is rhetorical. Until recently, the Bank's RTGS Future Roadmap framed extended hours mainly as a response to global commerce, faster cross-border flows, and reducing settlement risk on T+1 securities. The May 18 paper adds a third pillar: the Bank now writes about a "multi-money ecosystem in which different forms of money — including central bank money, commercial bank money, tokenised deposits and stablecoins — can coexist and interoperate." That language reflects work the Bank has been doing in parallel: the November 2025 consultation paper on a sterling-denominated systemic stablecoin regime, the Synchronisation Lab launching in May 2026 to let RT2 conditionally settle against external DLT ledgers, and the joint tokenisation vision with the FCA released the same day.

The honest read is that the always-on nature of stablecoin rails — Tether USDT (~$160B circulating) and Circle USDC (~$60B), which settle 24/7/365 across multiple chains — has done more to pressure the Bank's schedule than any human policy paper could have. As Sasha Mills, the BoE Executive Director for Financial Market Infrastructure, said at the January 2025 Tokenisation Summit: "The Bank is designing a synchronisation interface as part of the RTGS Future Roadmap. This will allow for the conditional settlement of funds in RTGS against assets on a variety of external ledgers — including programmable, DLT-based ledgers." The translation: stablecoins and tokenised deposits will settle on chain, but the central-bank-money leg has to be able to fire at any hour. Sterling cannot ride that train if it only operates 60 hours a week.

The T+1 angle is also material. The UK is moving to T+1 securities settlement in October 2027, the same month the Bank's 01:30 CHAPS start kicks in. T+1 compresses the funding window from two business days to one, which means a counterparty in Asia or the Americas trying to fund a UK transaction can no longer wait for the next London open. A central settlement rail that closes at 18:00 GMT and reopens twelve and a half hours later is mathematically incompatible with that workflow. The 2027 schedule is, in effect, the minimum viable response to T+1; the 2029 and 2031 steps are the catch-up to the always-on competitors.

Fed, ECB, and the global race to always-on

The Bank is not moving first. The Federal Reserve Board, on October 9, 2025, approved an expansion of Fedwire Funds Service and the National Settlement Service to 22 hours a day, 6 days a week (Sunday through Friday), targeting implementation later this decade. FedNow, the Fed's instant-payment rail, has been running 24/7/365 since launch. Europe is moving more cautiously: the ECB ran a public consultation in June 2025 on extending TARGET2 operating hours toward near-continuous availability, with a decision still pending. Switzerland's SIC and other major rails have not yet published comparable roadmaps.

The competitive geometry matters because settlement rails compete the way airport hubs compete: the busiest ones get more traffic, which justifies more infrastructure, which attracts more traffic. If the Fed reaches 22x6 a year ahead of the BoE and is publicly working toward 24x7, US-dollar-denominated tokenised activity has a structural reason to clear in Fedwire-adjacent rails. The UK's response — locking in a target near-24x7 schedule with the central-bank-money leg available — is the necessary condition for sterling to remain a credible competitor in tokenised wholesale activity over the next decade, and to keep the City's institutional collateral and securities pipelines from leaking to dollar rails by default.

The Bank's own positioning on this is unusually candid for an institution that prides itself on understatement. The roadmap is paired with explicit acknowledgement that stablecoin and tokenised-deposit competition has changed the baseline, that the move to T+1 has changed the funding window, and that the "multi-money ecosystem" is no longer a future scenario but a present one. The framing is now closer to what crypto industry advocates have been arguing for years — only this time it is the central bank making the argument.

The bottom line: The May 18 consultation is not the moment near-24x7 happens. It is the moment the Bank stops treating it as optional. Industry feedback runs through summer 2026, with implementation dates "not before" 2029 and 2031 respectively. The interesting follow-on is what stablecoin issuers, tokenised-deposit projects, and DLT-based settlement venues do with the now-public commitment that sterling central-bank-money will be available almost continuously by 2030. The slow-motion convergence between central-bank rails and 24/7 crypto rails just got a UK timeline.

Reviewed by Jason Lee, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, BlockAI News.

Sources

Primary sources

• BoE — RTGS / CHAPS next steps consultation (May 18, 2026)
• BoE — RTGS / CHAPS early-morning extension PS (Feb 2026)
• BoE — RTGS Future Roadmap landing page
• BoE — Sasha Mills, Tokenisation Summit speech
• Federal Reserve — Fedwire 22x6 (Oct 2025)
• ECB — T2 operating hours consultation
• @bankofengland — official X

How we report: This article cites primary sources, regulatory filings, and on-chain data where available. BlockAI News uses AI tools to assist with research and first-draft generation; every article is reviewed and edited by a human editor before publication. Read our full How We Report page, Editorial Policy, AI Use Policy, and Corrections Policy.