It still remains relatively rare for non-banks to be given direct access to a central bank’s real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system.

Data from the Payments Benchmarks 2022 shows some central banks allow several hundred institutions to access the core settlement system. But most users did not permit any non-banks to access it directly, and of those that did, typically only a handful of non-banks had such privileges.

In terms of overall institutions with access to the RTGS system, the maximum