The European Central Bank (ECB) has formally approved a one year extension to its T2-T2S consolidation project.
The delay to the merger of the two platforms, the Target2 real-time gross settlement mechansim and the T2S securities settlement system was widely expected after industry calls for a postponement.
The project will now be scheduled to go live in November 2022 after the ECB’s Governing Council approved the request.
Despite the fact that the project had already entered an internal software testing phase, the combination of the disruption caused by the Covid 19 pandemic and the rescheduling of Swift's global migration of cross-border payments to ISO 20022 had led market participants to seek more time to prepare.
In May, four of Europe's banking associations called for a 12 month delay and a similar sentiment was expressed in the ECB's community readiness survey.
One implication of the T2-T2S project delay is that it will put back the delivery of the Market Infrastructure Board's Eurosystem Collateral Management System which is likely to be rescheduled for June 2023 instead of November 2022.