New Delhi, Dec 10 (KNN) As the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced its Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) used for high-value transactions between banks, the apex banking body believes that India will become one of the few countries in the world to operate the same.

The move, first announced in October, is aimed to provide flexibility to customers and businesses while also in a bid to enhance the country's financial markets, the central bank said on Wednesday.

''India will become one of the few countries in the world to operate its RTGS system round the clock throughout the year. This comes within a year of operationalising NEFT 24x7 by the Reserve Bank,'' RBI said in an official statement on Wednesday.

Veteran banking analyst and journalist Tamal Bandyopadhyay also took to micro-blogging site twitter and said, ''@RBI announces 24x7x365 RTGS from 00:30 hours on 14 December. India will become one of the few countries in the world to operate RTGS systems round the clock through the year. NEFT was made operational 24x7 less than a year back. Tremendous progress in payments space.''

''Round the clock availability of RTGS will provide extended flexibility to businesses for effecting payments and will enable introduction of additional settlement cycles in ancillary payment systems. This can also be leveraged to enhance operations of Indian financial markets and cross-border payments,'' the apex banking body said.

RTGS began its operations on March 26, 2004 with a soft launch involving four banks, presently handling 6.35 lakh transactions daily for a value of Rs 4.17 lakh crore across 237 participant banks. The average ticket size for RTGS in November 2020 was Rs 57.96 lakh.