ECB TARGET Services in 2025: What the Annual Report Means for Payment and Settlement Teams

ByOfficer

Last updated: June 2026

When a TARGET payment fails to settle, the operations team finds out before the supervisor does. A missed cut-off on the T2 large-value system, a securities leg that does not match in T2S, an instant payment that cannot reach a counterparty bank in another currency: these are the events that turn a quiet afternoon into a reconciliation problem and, occasionally, into an incident report. So when the ECB published the TARGET Services Annual Report 2025 on 12 June 2026, it was not an abstract statistics release. It was a year-end account of the rails that EU payment and settlement teams actually depend on every working day.

The ECB TARGET Services cover four Eurosystem-operated systems: T2 for large-value and ancillary system payments, TARGET2-Securities (T2S) for securities settlement, the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement service (TIPS), and, from 2025, the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS). The 2025 report reads as a strong year for volumes and a reminder that high availability is not the same as zero disruption. Two of those four points matter most to reporting and operations teams, and they pull in opposite directions.

This is a change note, not a how-to. It walks through what the report records for each service, what changed operationally during 2025, and where teams misread the headline numbers. It does not tell you how to file a specific return, and it does not speculate on supervisory consequences.

Related reading: our guide to the ECB T2 extended hours roadmap

What the ECB TARGET Services Annual Report 2025 actually covers

The report describes developments across T2, T2S, TIPS and ECMS during 2025 and analyses each system’s activity and performance. It is a backward-looking operational record, not a rulebook and not a reporting instruction. No new supervisory return falls out of it.

The single biggest structural change in 2025 was the launch of ECMS on 16 June 2025. ECMS centralises Eurosystem collateral management on the same shared platform as payments and securities settlement, replacing the patchwork of national collateral management systems that national central banks ran before. For a treasury or collateral team, that is a real workflow shift: collateral mobilisation, valuation and the link to central bank credit now run through one harmonised system rather than separate domestic ones.

One distinction is worth making early, because it trips people up. The TARGET Services are the Eurosystem-operated systems. EURO1, the large-value system many people mention in the same breath, is operated by EBA Clearing, not by the Eurosystem, and it sits outside this report entirely. If you are scoping the annual report against your own payment flows, do not assume EURO1 traffic is captured here. It is not.

T2 large-value payments: steady growth, two disruptions

T2 is the backbone. In 2025 it settled, on average, 431,067 payments per day in euro, worth EUR 1,932.8 billion. Euro-denominated daily average volumes rose by 2.2 percent year on year, while total T2 volumes across currencies rose by 3.6 percent. The total value of euro payments settled in T2 rose by 6.3 percent, mainly driven by higher interbank payment activity. Those are not dramatic numbers on their own, but T2 is where the bulk of euro central bank money moves, so even single-digit growth represents a large absolute increase in settled value.

2025 was also the year the Danish krone went live in T2. From April 2025, the krone became available for settlement on the platform, and the report records average daily T2 settlement of 11,425 payments in Danish krone worth DKK 1,641.9 billion. This is the multi-currency model that the Eurosystem has been building toward: one technical platform settling several currencies, each in its own central bank money, rather than a euro-only system.

The harder part of the T2 story is reliability. The report records two significant disruptions to the T2 large-value payment system during 2025, each followed by a detailed action plan to address root causes and prevent recurrence. The first, on 27 February 2025, is significant enough that the report devotes a dedicated follow-up chapter to it. A second disruption later in the year affected ancillary system settlement. Annual technical availability for T2 still came in high, at 99.8 percent, which is exactly why the availability figure can mislead.

Here is the trap. A 99.8 percent annual availability figure sounds like a rounding error of downtime. But disruption does not arrive spread evenly across the year. It lands on specific days, and on those days the impact is concentrated: delayed settlement, extended operating hours to clear the backlog, contingency procedures invoked, and a scramble to confirm which payments settled and which did not. If your business continuity plan treats T2 outages as a remote tail risk because availability is “almost 100 percent,” 2025 is the counter-example sitting in the report.

T2S securities settlement: volumes up, efficiency the number to watch

T2S settles the securities leg against central bank money. In 2025 the report records average daily settlement of 922,533 transactions worth EUR 1,101.4 billion. Volumes grew by about 16.1 percent and the total settled value by about 12.8 percent, a stronger growth rate than T2.

For a settlement operations team, the figure that earns attention is not the headline volume but the settlement efficiency rate: how much of what should have settled actually did, on time. The report puts T2S settlement efficiency at 93.5 percent in volume terms and 98.0 percent in value terms for 2025. The gap between those two numbers is the operational signal. Efficiency in value terms running well above efficiency in volume terms tells you that the fails are concentrated in smaller transactions, while the large-value instructions clear. That is the normal pattern, but it is also the pattern that the CSDR settlement discipline regime, with its cash penalties on fails, is designed to pressure. Teams that read T2S efficiency alongside their own CSDR penalty exposure get a fuller picture than either number gives alone.

Where teams overreach is in treating the T2S efficiency rate as their own KPI. It is a platform-wide aggregate across every connected central securities depository. Your own fail rate can sit well above or below it, and the supervisor cares about yours, not the average. Use the platform figure as context, not as a benchmark you can quote back as your own performance.

TIPS instant payments: the 82.5 percent surge and what really drove it

The standout number in the 2025 report is TIPS growth. Transaction volumes on the instant payment service grew by 82.5 percent year on year. That is the kind of figure that gets quoted out of context, so it is worth being precise about what caused it.

The ECB attributes the surge to two specific drivers: new EU rules requiring banks to offer instant payments, and the addition of the Danish krone to the platform. The first is the Instant Payments Regulation, which obliges payment service providers in the euro area to offer instant credit transfers in euro, and which therefore pushes a large share of ordinary transfers onto rails that ultimately settle in TIPS. The growth is real, but it is a mandate-driven and onboarding-driven jump, not purely organic demand. If you are modelling TIPS volumes forward, do not extrapolate 82.5 percent as a run rate. It reflects a step change in the rules and a new currency joining, not a recurring annual trajectory.

TIPS is now a genuinely multi-currency settlement service. Alongside the euro, the Swedish krona settles in TIPS following the Riksbank’s migration of its instant payment platform, and the Danish krone joined during 2025. Average daily euro instant payment volumes in TIPS run in the millions, and Swedish krona and Danish krone flows settle in parallel, each in their own central bank money. TIPS technical availability for the year was the highest of the four services at 99.99 percent, which matters because instant means instant: a TIPS outage is visible to an end customer within seconds, not at end of day.

The Instant Payments Regulation also reaches into liquidity management, which connects to one of the report’s forward-looking themes. The same regulation that drives volume into TIPS changes how institutions are expected to fund and manage the cash sitting on TIPS Dedicated Cash Accounts. For background on the underlying obligation, our explainer on the SEPA Instant Payments Regulation sets out the scope, the deadlines, and the verification-of-payee requirement that came with it.

ECMS and the collateral angle

The Eurosystem Collateral Management System went live on 16 June 2025 and completes the TARGET Services suite. In its first partial year the report records average daily activity of 6,087 ECMS transactions, mainly mobilisations and demobilisations of credit claims as collateral. The corresponding stock of mobilised collateral averaged EUR 1,579.4 billion, and ECMS availability during critical operational hours was 99.96 percent.

For institutions that pledge collateral to access central bank credit, ECMS is the system change that has the most direct operational reach in 2025. It replaces the separate national collateral management systems with a single harmonised platform for Eurosystem credit operations, facilitating domestic and cross-border mobilisation through enhanced integration and standardisation. Teams that built domestic collateral workflows around a national central bank’s old system had to re-point those workflows during 2025. The report will fold ECMS into its standard service coverage from next year, so 2025 is the launch year baseline against which later activity gets measured.

What changes for reporting teams: less than the headlines suggest

This is the section where it pays to be blunt. The TARGET Services Annual Report 2025 does not create a new reporting obligation. There is no fresh ECB return, no new template, no additional submission triggered by the report. It is a performance account of infrastructure you already use.

The confusion usually starts with intraday liquidity. Because T2 extended hours and instant payment volumes are rising, teams sometimes assume there must be new intraday liquidity reporting attached. There is not, and it helps to keep two things separate. The first control is the ALMM template list itself, because the reporting boundary is visible there. The EBA additional liquidity monitoring metrics, templates C 66.00 to C 71.00, capture the maturity ladder, funding concentration, prices for various lengths of funding, roll-over of funding and counterbalancing capacity at the reporting reference date. They do not capture time-stamped intraday payment flows. Intraday liquidity monitoring sits under the separate BCBS 248 framework and associated supervisory arrangements, not under the binding ALMM templates. If you want the boundary spelled out, our guide to LCR, NSFR and ALMM liquidity reporting draws the line between point-in-time ALMM data and intraday monitoring.

What does change, indirectly, is liquidity behaviour. From June 2026, the Eurosystem will begin automatically remunerating overnight liquidity held on TIPS Dedicated Cash Accounts that exceeds minimum reserve requirements, at the deposit facility rate. That will remove a long-standing disincentive to leave cash parked on TIPS overnight, and it is one of the special-topic threads the report follows from the Instant Payments Regulation. One caveat that teams get wrong: this remuneration is not a blanket benefit for everyone with a TIPS account. It applies to eligible monetary policy counterparties with access to the deposit facility. Payment institutions, electronic money institutions and crypto-asset service providers that reach TIPS through other arrangements should not assume they qualify on the same terms.

The roadmap: extended hours, more currencies, cross-border links

The report is also a statement of direction. The Eurosystem has flagged three forward-looking work strands that operations teams should have on their radar, even though none of them is a 2025 deliverable.

The first is extending T2 operating hours, with a long-run ambition of moving large-value settlement toward continuous, around-the-clock operation. That is the strand with the most operational consequence for staffing, weekend cover and end-of-day processes, and it is the subject of its own report chapter. The second is adding further currencies to the platform, building on the Danish krone going live in T2 and the multi-currency model in TIPS. The third is linking the Eurosystem’s instant payment infrastructure with fast payment systems in other regions, so that instant payments can run across borders rather than stopping at the euro area boundary. This cross-border interlinking work, building on the TIPS cross-currency settlement already live for the Swedish krona and Danish krone, sits in the roadmap rather than as a live service. (Pontes, the Eurosystem’s separate DLT bridge for settling tokenised transactions in central bank money, belongs to the tokenised-settlement track, not to instant-payment interlinking.)

These connect to a wider settlement-modernisation agenda that includes the digital euro and tokenised settlement experiments. If you are tracking where central bank money settlement is heading, our coverage of ECB Project Agora and tokenised cross-border settlement and of the digital euro PSP pilot picks up the threads that the TARGET roadmap leaves open.

Reading the numbers without overreading them

When teams reconcile a settlement day, the first control is not the headline value cleared but the availability and incident log, because that is where the day actually went wrong or right. The 2025 report rewards the same reading. The growth figures are strong across the board, but the operationally important content is the pair of T2 disruptions, the T2S efficiency gap between volume and value, and the quiet but real change in TIPS funding economics from June 2026.

The other discipline is resisting the urge to treat platform aggregates as your own metrics. A 99.8 percent T2 availability rate, a 93.5 percent T2S efficiency rate, an 82.5 percent TIPS growth rate: none of those is a number you can lift into your own management reporting as if it described your institution. They describe the shared infrastructure. Your own availability, your own fails, your own instant payment volumes are what your supervisor and your board will ask about, and they will not match the platform average.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ECB TARGET Services?

They are the Eurosystem-operated market infrastructure services: T2 for large-value and ancillary system payments in central bank money, TARGET2-Securities (T2S) for securities settlement, the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement service (TIPS) for instant payments, and the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS) for collateral, which launched in 2025.

When was the TARGET Services Annual Report 2025 published?

The ECB published the report on 12 June 2026. It covers developments and performance across T2, T2S, TIPS and ECMS during the 2025 calendar year.

Does the report create any new reporting obligations?

No. The annual report is a performance and activity account of the TARGET Services. It does not introduce a new ECB return, template or submission. Existing reporting frameworks such as the EBA liquidity templates and BCBS 248 intraday monitoring are unchanged by it.

Why did TIPS volumes grow 82.5 percent in 2025?

The ECB attributes the growth to two drivers: new EU rules requiring banks to offer instant payments, which push ordinary euro transfers onto instant rails that settle in TIPS, and the addition of the Danish krone to the platform. It is a mandate-driven and onboarding-driven jump rather than a recurring annual run rate.

Is EURO1 part of the TARGET Services?

No. EURO1 is a large-value payment system operated by EBA Clearing, not by the Eurosystem. It is outside the scope of the TARGET Services Annual Report, which covers only the Eurosystem-operated systems.

What happened with the T2 disruptions in 2025?

The report records two significant disruptions to the T2 large-value payment system during 2025, each followed by a detailed action plan to address root causes and prevent recurrence. The first occurred on 27 February 2025 and is the subject of a dedicated follow-up chapter; a second disruption later in the year affected ancillary system settlement. Annual T2 technical availability was still recorded at 99.8 percent.

What is ECMS and when did it launch?

ECMS is the Eurosystem Collateral Management System. It launched on 16 June 2025 and centralises collateral mobilisation, valuation and the link to central bank credit on the shared TARGET platform, replacing the separate national collateral management systems.

How does intraday liquidity relate to the TARGET Services?

TARGET activity feeds intraday liquidity usage, but intraday liquidity monitoring is governed by the BCBS 248 framework and supervisory arrangements, not by the EBA additional liquidity monitoring metrics. The ALMM templates capture point-in-time positions at the reporting reference date, not time-stamped intraday payment flows.

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Key Takeaways

  • The ECB published the TARGET Services Annual Report 2025 on 12 June 2026, covering T2, T2S, TIPS and ECMS performance during 2025.
  • T2 settled an average of 431,067 euro payments per day worth EUR 1,932.8 billion. Euro-denominated daily average volumes rose by 2.2 percent, total T2 volumes across currencies rose by 3.6 percent, and total euro payment value rose by 6.3 percent. The Danish krone went live in T2 from April 2025.
  • Two significant T2 disruptions occurred in 2025, including the 27 February 2025 incident, despite annual T2 availability of 99.8 percent. High availability is not the same as no disruption.
  • T2S settled an average of 922,533 transactions per day worth EUR 1,101.4 billion, with settlement efficiency of 93.5 percent in volume terms and 98.0 percent in value terms.
  • TIPS transaction volumes grew 82.5 percent, driven by the EU Instant Payments Regulation and the addition of the Danish krone, not by organic demand alone.
  • ECMS launched on 16 June 2025, centralising Eurosystem collateral management on the shared platform.
  • The report creates no new reporting obligation; intraday liquidity remains a BCBS 248 matter, distinct from the EBA ALMM templates.
  • From June 2026, overnight liquidity on TIPS Dedicated Cash Accounts that exceeds minimum reserve requirements will be remunerated at the deposit facility rate, but only for eligible monetary policy counterparties with deposit facility access.

Sources and References

What to put on the operations team’s radar now

Treat the 2025 report as a planning input, not a filing trigger. The two T2 disruptions are the prompt to dust off the business continuity plan and stress-test the assumption that a near-100 percent availability rail will be there every settlement day. The TIPS surge and the June 2026 remuneration change are the prompt to revisit how instant payment liquidity is funded and where overnight balances sit. And the roadmap toward extended T2 hours, more currencies and cross-border instant payment links is the prompt to ask, early, what longer operating windows will mean for staffing and end-of-day processes. None of that is a deadline. All of it is the kind of foresight that keeps a payment desk ahead of the next incident report.

Disclaimer: The information on RegReportingDesk.com is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, regulatory, tax, or compliance advice. Always consult your compliance officer, legal counsel, or the relevant supervisory authority for guidance specific to your institution.

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