Pricing policy approved for T2

18 June 2020

The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) has approved the pricing policy for T2, which will be introduced as part of the T2-T2S consolidation project and will replace TARGET2. From a technical perspective, T2 is split into two distinct services: central liquidity management (CLM) across all TARGET Services and real-time gross settlement (RTGS).

CLM will serve the ECB’s statutory task of conducting monetary policy operations and therefore the Eurosystem does not aim to recover its development and operational costs. It will only pursue the full recovery, over a ten-year period of operation, of the costs of developing and operating the new RTGS service.

The pricing policy for the RTGS service is largely based on the current TARGET2 pricing scheme. It aims to ensure attractiveness and broad access to settlement in central bank money for entities of different sizes and with different settlement models. Compared with today’s TARGET2 pricing, the new pricing scheme will support the cost recovery objective of the RTGS service by introducing two new features:

• two new bands in the core banking pricing scheme, based on transaction volumes (priced at €0.08 and €0.05 per transaction) for participants that reach defined levels of traffic;
• a 100% increase in all ancillary system fees (both fixed and transaction-based), mainly as a result of additional contingency measures and new features designed to support ancillary systems’ settlement.

In view of the uncertainty around current RTGS volumetric growth assumptions (2% year-on-year growth), the ECB’s Governing Council will review the T2 pricing policy after the first two years of operation. Depending on the actual growth rate of settlement volumes in the future, the pricing scheme may require adjustment to ensure full cost recovery.

More details will be published in the coming months as part of a pricing guide for all TARGET Services.