Types of Clearing Systems
- 04:07
An introduction to the different types of clearing systems available to support client bank account structures
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Transcript
Hi, and welcome to our payables and receivables session. We're going to dive straight in with some of the domestic and international clearing systems. This is going to be done at a high level, so we're not going to go into absolute detail each of the transaction types, but it's going to give you an idea of some of the building blocks that we need to think about as we are creating an account structure to then put into a liquidity structure. Now, people may think that there's different transaction types across domestic and international clearing systems. The reality is that domestic clearing systems are knitted together to create international clearing systems. Now what we've got here is a table starting on your left hand side is very much orientated towards what you might use as a private individual to make your payments and receive payments. Going right across to the right hand side of the spectrum to the continuous link settlement system, which is primarily used just by finance institutions. Caveat, though there are a couple of corporates there as well. So if we just take a second here. So on the left we've written down cards, cash, and mobile. With mobile, being the new kid on the block, cards have been established for a good 20, 30 years by now, and cash has been the primary source for most people to make their transactions for several hundreds of years now. An interesting note is that cards has now just managed to overtake cash for the highest volume of transactions going through. So overall on the whole with cash cards and mobile finality is accepted at the time the transaction happens, we then move on to checks. Now, check clearing alters by country to country. In fact, these days sometimes the checks don't move. You can scan them and they can be, the image of their data is enough to actually clear the check. However, clearing cycles do differ from country to country. The automated clearing houses, again tend to differ in countries. In the UK it's a three day cycle. You submit your data on day one. Day two is a bank processing day, and day three is when the debiting and crediting happens simultaneously for both the beneficiary and the payer. So the ACH clearing system in the UK is called BACS, and in the US it's called NACHA. And in other countries it's got its own name. Across Europe, it's SEPA. We've also got instant payments. These have started coming in around the world very much over the last decade. They tend to spring off the ACH system, and instead of it being a clearing system where it takes a couple of days, it happens intra the day. Normally within some sort of timeline, like 20 minutes to two hours. In the UK it's called faster payment. We have already mentioned the single Euro payments area. This is the ACH that goes across the Eurozone, and all countries had to collapse their traditional ACH layering systems into SEPA. There is also end of day and intraday net settlement systems in the US this is the CHIPS payment. However, the regulators and the central banks have got involved because there is still an element of settlement risk here, and these types of systems are being replaced by the next ones to the right real time growth settlement systems overall. So whilst the CHIPS payments today, the volume of payments that are going via CHIPS in the US has decreased significantly, and we have now moved much more into a real time growth settlement system, which is Fedwire in the US, CHAPS in the UK, TARGET2 in Europe, CHATS in Hong Kong. Most countries have got their own variations of it as say in Europe, they've all gone to TARGET2. And then right on the right hand side, we've got continuous link settlement system. This settlement system is related to high value FX transactions and was brought in place to get rid of Hersstatt risk. We're not going to spend the half an hour, 20 minutes it would take right now to run through Hersstatt risk. However, just bear in mind CLS is always in relation to large ticket main FX currencies that are freely tradable around the world. So we've just ran through all the, all the different clearing systems, mentioned the fact that these are domestic clearing systems, they're linked together internationally. What you bear in mind here is with your account structure, you need to always have reflected the transaction types that a corporate wants to do. The corporate goal is always to maximize the volume of in-border transactions and to minimize the volume of cross border transactions. The reason for this is that whenever a transaction goes across a border as bank, we do take a share of the action. So we charge more money for that type of transaction. So the corporate goal to minimize the banking fees as well as minimize the risks involved in the actual transaction type.