Who supplies liquidity in CHAPS?

Evangelos Benos and Christina Fritz

Every day UK banks and corporates (“participants”) make sizeable payments to each other through CHAPS, the country’s high-value payment system. However, these payments are liquidity-intensive: every payment must be pre-funded, i.e. the payer must have in place the full amount to be paid. This can be costly, so each participant would prefer to first receive some money from another one and then make its own payments by recycling the received amount. However, this still requires that some participants supply intra-day liquidity to the system by making the first payments. But who are these participants? This post shows that it is typically the smaller ones and also those perceived by markets to be riskier that get the ball rolling…

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How credit risk can incentivise banks to keep making payments at the height of a crisis

Marius Jurgilas, Ben Norman and Tomohiro Ota.

The final, practical determinant of whether a bank is a going concern is: does it have the liquidity to make its payments as they become due? Thus, the ultimate crucible in which financial crises play out is the payment system. At the height of recent crises, some banks delayed making payments for fear of paying to a bank that would fail (Norman (2015)). This post sets out a design feature in a payment system that creates incentives, especially during financial crises, for banks to keep making payments. This feature could address situations where banks in the system would otherwise be tempted to postpone their payments to a bank that is (rumoured to be) in trouble.

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BoE archives reveal little known lesson from the 1974 failure of Herstatt Bank

Ben Norman

In June of 1974, a small German bank, Herstatt Bank, failed. While the bank itself was not large, its failure became synonymous with fx settlement risk, and its lessons served as the impetus for work over the subsequent three decades to implement real-time settlement systems now used the world over. Documents from the Bank of England’s Archive shed light on a lesser known aspect of Herstatt’s failure – the chain reaction it caused across financial centres as banks in different countries delayed settling their payments to each other. The lesson for policymakers today to grapple with is: when a bank fails, could we still expect surviving banks to delay making payments, with a potential chain reaction in the payment system?

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