Balancing complexity and performance in forecasting models: insights from CHAPS volume predictions

Tom Davies

CHAPS is a critical element of the UK’s payments landscape, handling 92% of UK payment values despite comprising 0.5% of volumes. CHAPS is used for high-value and time-critical payments, including money market and foreign exchange transactions, supplier payments, and house purchases. We forecast CHAPS volumes to help CHAPS participants in making staffing decisions and support our long-term planning including system capacity and tariff setting. While advanced forecasting methods can capture subtle, non-linear patterns, a tension arises: should we use complex models for the most accurate prediction, or use simpler, transparent approaches that stakeholders can quickly grasp? In practice, forecasting isn’t as straightforward as picking whichever model maximises performance; it is the combination of computation and domain expertise that shapes success.

Continue reading →

Payments without borders: using ISO 20022 to identify cross-border payments in CHAPS

James Duffy and James Sanders

Understanding a payment’s journey around the globe can be difficult. As the operator of the UK’s high-value payment system (CHAPS), the Bank is all too familiar with this challenge. By leveraging the benefits of the newly introduced ISO 20022 standard for messaging, we have devised a new methodology to identify and classify cross-border CHAPS payments more effectively. This method reveals that international transactions form over half of CHAPS activity, and offers new insights into the global payment corridors for CHAPS payments. Gaining a deeper understanding of payment flows could assist policymakers in prioritising their efforts to reduce global barriers as they implement the G20 roadmap for enhancing cross-border payments.

Continue reading →

Bitesize: Understanding housing activity in real time

Christopher Hackworth, Nicola Shadbolt and David Seaward.

While official housing market statistics are relatively timely and high frequency, they usually come with a lag of at least one month. So indicators that lead official estimates are helpful for identifying turning points, or any ‘shocks’ to the economy.

Continue reading “Bitesize: Understanding housing activity in real time” →

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.

Continue reading “How credit risk can incentivise banks to keep making payments at the height of a crisis” →

Saving Liquidity in a Liquidity-abundant World: Why don’t banks use less liquidity when making high-value payments?

David Seaward.

CHAPS banks have oodles of liquidity and are not afraid to use it, as quantitative easing has meant banks accumulated unprecedented quantities of reserves. And in this liquidity-abundant world, banks are less likely to be concerned with how well they use tools for liquidity saving in the Bank’s Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) infrastructure. And besides, the timings of liquidity-hungry payments are stubborn. They can’t always be retimed to optimise liquidity usage, and this means that the potential for liquidity savings in RTGS from the Bank’s Liquidity Savings Mechanism (LSM) is limited.

Continue reading “Saving Liquidity in a Liquidity-abundant World: Why don’t banks use less liquidity when making high-value payments?” →