The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) has decided to extend the timeline of the T2-T2S consolidation project by one year to November 2022.
Although the project had already entered an internal software testing phase, known as “Eurosystem acceptance testing”, a recent community readiness survey showed that there were COVID-19 related challenges.
The pandemic and the rescheduling of SWIFT’s global migration of cross-border payments to ISO 20022 had posed challenges to national financial communities across Europe.
As a result, market participants indicated that they would prefer the go-live date of the T2-T2S consolidation project to be postponed by 12 months.
Owing to project dependencies, the extension of the T2-T2S consolidation project’s timeline also prompted the Market Infrastructure Board to review the timeline for delivery of the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS), according to the ECB.
As a result of that review, the ECB’s Governing Council has decided to extend the go-live date of the ECMS project from November 2022 until at least June 2023, with the new date set to be confirmed by October 2020 following further investigations.