Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) is the generic name for a system that settles each payment individually, immediately, and irrevocably, in central-bank money, the moment it is processed, no batching, no netting, no waiting for a cycle. India's system, run by the RBI, is literally named RTGS; the US equivalent, run by the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, is the Fedwire Funds Service. Trace a single payment hop by hop and the "whose balance sheet moves" question answers itself cleanly, because RTGS is the simplest rail in this entire module precisely because it never nets anything.
How does an RTGS payment settle, hop by hop?
Hop 1, the payer's bank. The payer instructs their bank to send an amount via RTGS. The payer's bank debits the payer's deposit account (its liability to the payer falls) and simultaneously has its own reserve account at the central bank debited by the identical amount (its asset falls). Both sides of the payer's bank's balance sheet fall by the same amount, it shrinks, symmetrically; it does not expand.
Hop 2, the central bank. The central bank's own balance sheet does not change size at all. It simply relabels which bank's reserve account holds the money: the payer's bank's reserve liability falls, the payee's bank's reserve liability rises, by the identical amount, on the central bank's own books. The central bank is not a third balance sheet growing or shrinking; it is the ledger on which the definitive relabeling happens, and that relabeling is settlement finality.
Hop 3, the payee's bank. The payee's bank's reserve account at the central bank is credited (its asset rises) and it simultaneously credits the payee's deposit account (its liability to the payee rises). Both sides of the payee's bank's balance sheet rise by the same amount: it expands.
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What are the RTGS rules in India?
Net the whole system: the payer's deposit money was destroyed, the payee's deposit money was created, in equal and offsetting amounts, no new money was created anywhere (this is a pure transfer of already-existing deposits, not a new loan, so M7.01's money-creation mechanism is not in play here at all, that only happens when a bank originates new credit, which the card payments section will show you a genuine instance of). The India RBI's RTGS System Regulations (2013, as amended) define exactly this mechanism, and the RBI has published (per its press release announcing the change) that RTGS has operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year since 14 December 2020, before that date it ran on a fixed daily window like Fedwire still does. RTGS in India is reserved for high-value payments, with a minimum transaction value of ₹2,00,000 and no upper ceiling (check the current threshold at rbi.org.in, thresholds are exactly the kind of operational fact a single RBI circular can move). Every one of those individual transactions settles immediately and irrevocably the moment the RBI's own books update, there is no netting window during which an RTGS payment could be unwound.
What are the Fedwire operating hours?
Fedwire runs on the identical gross, real-time, central-bank-money mechanism in US dollars, at the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, but (unlike India's 24x7x365 RTGS) it still operates on a fixed daily window: per the Federal Reserve's own published Fedwire Funds Service operating-hours schedule (frbservices.org, as of 2026-07), the service opens at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on the preceding calendar day and closes at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time, a 22-hour window, every calendar day that is not a Federal Reserve holiday (excluding Saturdays and Sundays); within that window, staggered cutoffs apply to different message types (tax payments and certain special accounts at 5:00 p.m. ET; ordinary customer transfers at 6:45 p.m. ET; bank-to-bank transfers and other core messages at 7:00 p.m. ET; status requests at 7:15 p.m. ET). Treat every one of those hours as perishable: the Federal Reserve has been extending Fedwire's operating hours in stages (Federal Register notices in both 2024 and 2025 propose and adopt further expansions, with the stated direction being toward eventual round-the-clock operation), so confirm the current schedule at frbservices.org before relying on it operationally. What will not change is the mechanism: within its operating window, every Fedwire payment is gross, real-time, and final the instant the Federal Reserve Bank's books update, the identical three-hop trace as RTGS, in dollars instead of rupees.
{
"skill": "Drafting a balance-sheet or netting verification script, and summarizing an operating-rules document, without letting AI be the source of any operational fact",
"use": "Ask an AI assistant to scaffold a Python function that checks a set of bank balance-sheet entries for consistency (assets moved = liabilities moved, at each party) or to summarize a long RTGS/Fedwire operating-rules PDF into a table of cutoff times — then verify every fact the summary states against the actual document before using it.",
"tools": ["Chat assistants — Claude, ChatGPT, for drafting the summary or the scaffolding function", "A code tool that can actually run the Python (check the arithmetic, don't just read it)"],
"prompt": "Summarize the operating hours, cutoff times, and minimum/maximum transaction values in this RTGS/Fedwire/NEFT operating-rules document I am pasting or linking. For every number, quote the exact sentence of the source document it came from. If you are not certain a figure is current, say so explicitly rather than stating a plausible-sounding one.",
"verify": "Every hour, threshold, and fee is exactly the kind of precise, jurisdiction-specific, frequently-revised fact AI0.01 warns is easiest for a model to state fluently and wrong. Trace each one to the actual regulator/operator document (rbi.org.in, frbservices.org, the Federal Register, npci.org.in) and date-check it against today, never against the model's memory (Guardrail 1-5, especially Trace and Date-check).",
"diy": "You must already be able to trace a gross-settlement payment's three hops and state which balance sheets expand versus shrink from first principles — that is exactly what this Core section builds, and no AI summary can substitute for having done it once by hand.",
"market": "IN"
}