Markets & payments
A safe and efficient payments system is critical to supporting day-to-day financial transactions in the economy. For this reason, the Reserve Bank oversees and operates New Zealand’s wholesale payment and settlement systems.
The Bank also monitors and liaises with financial markets to manage liquidity in the New Zealand banking system, and manages foreign reserves to support monetary policy objectives and maintain orderly markets.
Payment operations
The Reserve Bank has both an oversight and operational role in the payment system in New Zealand. The operational activities of the payment system include the provision of currency and a range of payment and settlement services.
ESAS is the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's Exchange Settlement Account System and along with Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) allows individual transactions between financial institutions to be settled electronically as the transactions happen.
We are currently testing the applications that are to be delivered under the PSR Programme. ESAS is out with our account holders who are nearing the end of their industry acceptance testing. The NZClear application is still with RBNZ, awaiting quality gates to be attained, then that too will be released to members to perform their own testing and back end changes.
We are anticipating that post the successful passing of the second quality gate (anticipated for February 2019), that we will be in a position to indicate a start date for NZ Clear industry acceptance testing as well as a go live date for both systems.