London FX committee minutes: dealers weigh near 24/7 sterling settlement and its costs
Victoria Shinder2 min readThe Bank of England published on 7 October the minutes of the London Foreign Exchange Joint Standing Committee (FXJSC) main committee meeting of 24 June 2026, together with those of its operations and legal sub-committees from 16 June. The FXJSC, chaired by the Bank, brings together wholesale FX market participants, infrastructure providers and UK regulators. Minutes are released months after the meeting, so this is a record of what the market's practitioners were discussing at the start of the summer, not a new decision.
The item that matters for sterling: settlement hours. Bank of England officials Anna Koch and Richard Lewis presented the Bank's plan to move towards near 24/7 settlement in RTGS, the central bank's real-time gross settlement system, and CHAPS, the sterling high-value payment system, and pointed to a consultation paper seeking views on the implications and next steps. Committee members discussed what that would mean for FX market structure. The minutes record four concerns:
- financial stability, including the need for mechanisms to support resolution of a failing firm in a near 24/7 environment;
- the scale of investment required;
- the need for further work with industry;
- potential challenges for treasury and funding models at the firms themselves.
For a currency market that already trades around the clock while sterling settles only during set hours, those are the practical questions: who funds positions overnight, and how a bank is resolved when the payment system never closes.
The global code. From the Global Foreign Exchange Committee's June meeting, the Bank's Natalie Lovell reported a new Technology and Innovation Working Group and preparations for the 2027 review of the FX Global Code, plus an update on collecting data on FX settlement risk; results of the April 2025 BIS settlement survey have been published. The financial markets trade association GFMA has joined the GFXC's Partner Network, and its FX division is focused on trade allocation, MiFID trade reporting and the effect of the SA-CCR counterparty-risk rules.
Elsewhere in the minutes: the operations sub-committee discussed atomic settlement, cross-border payments and tokenisation; the legal sub-committee is reviewing the FXJSC competition guidelines; the FCA described the joint FCA–Bank of England review harmonising transaction and post-trade reporting; and the Financial Markets Standards Board is reviewing the application of AI in financial markets. Market updates from CME Group and State Street covered cross-asset correlations, hedging and positioning, with the committee discussing reserve currencies, gold, retail participation, the Middle East and equity valuations. The minutes give no figures or conclusions on those market themes.
Source: Bank of England, Minutes of the London FXJSC Main Committee Meeting – 24 June 2026, published 7 October 2026 — https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/minutes/2026/june/fxjsc-main-committee-meeting-24-june-2026