Published: 20.06.2022

Today, the Council of Latvijas Banka adopted the "Rules for participation in TARGET-Latvija", thus improving Latvia's national legal acts in relation to the TARGET2 payment system modernisation planned for November 2022.

On 21 November, TARGET-Latvija (part of the TARGET payment system, the world's third largest payment system) will replace the old generation system, which has been operational since 2007. The new TARGET system will not only use modern infrastructure and high cyber security solutions, but also provide a wider range of opportunities for liquidity management of credit institutions and interbank settlement by utilising central bank money and in compliance with ISO 20022 standard.

The TARGET system modernisation concludes a process on which a decision was taken by the Governing Council of the European Central Bank on 6 December 2017, approving the project aimed at consolidating and optimising the TARGET2 system and TARGET2-Securities (T2S) platform by using the latest approaches and technological innovation (T2-T2S consolidation project).

The implementation of the T2-T2S consolidation project resulted in the creation of the TARGET system (the new generation European automated real-time gross settlement system). Thus, the TARGET2-Latvija component system will be replaced by the new TARGET-Latvija component system.

In 2021, TARGET2-Latvija processed on average 882 payments per day totalling 1.1 billion euro. The total volume of payments decreased by 8.4%, while their total value rose by 2.5% in comparison with 2020.