ECB’s Governing Council approves one-year extension to T2-T2S consolidation project timeline (updated on 30 July)

The Governing Council of the ECB has decided to extend the timeline of the T2-T2S consolidation project by one year, following discussions with Europe’s financial community. The project is now scheduled to go live in November 2022. In addition, the Governing Council has approved to start User Testing in December 2021.

The project had already entered an internal software testing phase, known as “Eurosystem acceptance testing”. However, a recent community readiness survey showed that the coronavirus (COVID-19) 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. In the light of that fact, 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). 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.