Payments Training Hub
Scenario starts at 8 PAYMENT OPERATIONS STARTED LIVE 01 Scenario - morning on a Tuesday in London. ACTIVE 02 Stabilise and get facts - Your first step is to stabilise the position QUEUED 03 By half past 9 - morning the facts are clearer and you can QUEUED 04 At 12 noon CHAPS recovers - recovery creates a new risk QUEUED 05 By 5 in the afternoon - day is closing, and your last job QUEUED The scenario starts at 8 in the morning on a Tuesday in London. Step 1 of 5 Scenario starts at 8 STARTED Scenario morning on a Tuesday in London. ACTIVE Stabilise and get facts Your first step is to stabilise the position QUEUED By half past 9 morning the facts are clearer and you can QUEUED At 12 noon CHAPS recovers recovery creates a new risk QUEUED By 5 in the afternoon day is closing, and your last job QUEUED The scenario starts at 8 in the morning on a Tuesday in London.
Stabilise and get facts PAYMENT OPERATIONS IN PROGRESS LIVE 01 Scenario - morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE 02 Stabilise and get facts - Your first step is to stabilise the position ACTIVE 03 By half past 9 - morning the facts are clearer and you can QUEUED 04 At 12 noon CHAPS recovers - recovery creates a new risk QUEUED 05 By 5 in the afternoon - day is closing, and your last job QUEUED Your first step is to stabilise the position and get facts before you act. Step 2 of 5 Stabilise and get facts IN PROGRESS Scenario morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE Stabilise and get facts Your first step is to stabilise the position ACTIVE By half past 9 morning the facts are clearer and you can QUEUED At 12 noon CHAPS recovers recovery creates a new risk QUEUED By 5 in the afternoon day is closing, and your last job QUEUED Your first step is to stabilise the position and get facts before you act.
By half past 9 PAYMENT OPERATIONS IN PROGRESS LIVE 01 Scenario - morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE 02 Stabilise and get facts - Your first step is to stabilise the position DONE 03 By half past 9 - morning the facts are clearer and you can ACTIVE 04 At 12 noon CHAPS recovers - recovery creates a new risk QUEUED 05 By 5 in the afternoon - day is closing, and your last job QUEUED By half past 9 in the morning the facts are clearer and you can make the first hard choices. Step 3 of 5 By half past 9 IN PROGRESS Scenario morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE Stabilise and get facts Your first step is to stabilise the position DONE By half past 9 morning the facts are clearer and you can ACTIVE At 12 noon CHAPS recovers recovery creates a new risk QUEUED By 5 in the afternoon day is closing, and your last job QUEUED By half past 9 in the morning the facts are clearer and you can make the first hard choices.
At 12 noon CHAPS recovers PAYMENT OPERATIONS IN PROGRESS LIVE 01 Scenario - morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE 02 Stabilise and get facts - Your first step is to stabilise the position DONE 03 By half past 9 - morning the facts are clearer and you can DONE 04 At 12 noon CHAPS recovers - recovery creates a new risk ACTIVE 05 By 5 in the afternoon - day is closing, and your last job QUEUED At 12 noon CHAPS recovers, but the recovery creates a new risk, because the system is now facing a backlog from every bank in the country. Step 4 of 5 At 12 noon CHAPS recovers IN PROGRESS Scenario morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE Stabilise and get facts Your first step is to stabilise the position DONE By half past 9 morning the facts are clearer and you can DONE At 12 noon CHAPS recovers recovery creates a new risk ACTIVE By 5 in the afternoon day is closing, and your last job QUEUED At 12 noon CHAPS recovers, but the recovery creates a new risk, because the system is now facing a backlog from every bank in the country.
By 5 in the afternoon PAYMENT OPERATIONS COMPLETE LIVE 01 Scenario - morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE 02 Stabilise and get facts - Your first step is to stabilise the position DONE 03 By half past 9 - morning the facts are clearer and you can DONE 04 At 12 noon CHAPS recovers - recovery creates a new risk DONE 05 By 5 in the afternoon - day is closing, and your last job ACTIVE By 5 in the afternoon the day is closing, and your last job is to prove that the day balanced and to hand over cleanly. Step 5 of 5 By 5 in the afternoon COMPLETE Scenario morning on a Tuesday in London. DONE Stabilise and get facts Your first step is to stabilise the position DONE By half past 9 morning the facts are clearer and you can DONE At 12 noon CHAPS recovers recovery creates a new risk DONE By 5 in the afternoon day is closing, and your last job ACTIVE By 5 in the afternoon the day is closing, and your last job is to prove that the day balanced and to hand over cleanly.

Key points of this lesson, in order.

0:00 / 3:53 Step 1 of 5

Exercise: Run the Operations Shift

Payment Operations, Lesson 7 of 7, Narration 3:53, D11 Operations, exceptions and reconciliation

SettlementValue dateLiquidity

What you will learn

Your objective. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain exercise: run the operations shift. The scenario starts at 8 in the morning on a Tuesday in London.

Why it matters. You are the operations team leader for a bank that processes 1.8 million payments a day.

Chapter objective: Learner explains payment operations, including daily processing, cut-offs, monitoring, incident handling, and reporting, and builds a daily operations checklist for a payment team. Learner demonstrates this skill using realistic banking examples, explaining each step clearly and using correct terminology throughout.

Key learning points

  • Scenario starts at 8
  • Stabilise and get facts
  • By half past 9
  • At 12 noon CHAPS recovers
  • By 5 in the afternoon

Key terms

Settlement: The final movement of funds between banks to discharge obligations created by cleared payments. Settlement is usually made in central bank money or through correspondent accounts.

Value date: The date on which funds become available to the beneficiary and on which interest starts to accrue. It is the date used for settlement and for nostro posting.

Liquidity: Cash or assets that a bank can use immediately to meet payment obligations. Banks manage liquidity by forecasting inflows and outflows, funding nostro and settlement accounts, and using central bank...

Payment flow diagram showing Exercise: Run the Operations Shift.

Practise this lesson

Exercise

Work out what the beneficiary receives for a 500,000 pounds payment under OUR, SHA and BEN.

Use the charge arrangement rules in this lesson and the correspondent and beneficiary bank fees named in the lesson.

  1. What to do. Calculate the amount credited under each of the three arrangements and state who pays each fee.

Correct result. Under OUR the sender pays all charges and the beneficiary receives the full amount. Under SHA the sender pays the sending charges and the beneficiary pays the receiving charges. Under BEN the beneficiary pays all charges and receives the amount less all fees.

Why. The charge arrangement decides who pays and how much arrives. A customer who was promised the full amount and receives less will complain, and the complaint lands on the analyst.

Check your understanding

Practice question

Which of the following best describes exercise: run the operations shift?

Takeaway and next step

What to remember

You write the handover note with the closing queue counts, the incident reference for the CHAPS outage, the names of the two customers who need a follow up call tomorrow, and the lesson learned, which is to add a sort code validation check to the payroll file intake so the same error cannot happen again.

Reconcile the payment in this lesson against its statement and find the break.

Open the Accounting and Reconciliation Lab →

Builds on "Incident Management, Outages and Business Continuity".

Transcript and full text

Show transcript

The scenario starts at 8 in the morning on a Tuesday in London. You are the operations team leader for a bank that processes 1.8 million payments a day. The overnight batch left a backlog of 6,400 payments in the repair queue, worth 38 million pounds, because a file from a large payroll customer contained 6,400 records with an invalid sort code. The CHAPS system has reported a partial outage, with settlement delayed by at least two hours. Your US dollar nostro account with JPMorgan Chase holds 4.2 million dollars, but the queue of dollar payments waiting for release is worth 22 million dollars. Your first decision is what to do in the first thirty minutes, before the morning peak arrives. Your first step is to stabilise the position and get facts before you act. You call a short huddle at 5 past 8 in the morning, assign four analysts to the payroll file, two analysts to the CHAPS queue and one analyst to the dollar liquidity position. You ask the payroll analysts to confirm whether the sort code error is the same for all 6,400 records, which would allow a bulk fix, or whether each record needs individual checking. You ask the CHAPS analysts to list every CHAPS payment above 500,000 pounds and its value date, so you know which customers face a real deadline. You call treasury at quarter past 8 in the morning to ask for a dollar funding plan, and you log the incident with technology so the CHAPS outage is formally tracked. By half past 9 in the morning the facts are clearer and you can make the first hard choices. The payroll error is the same transposed sort code in all 6,400 records, so the team applies a bulk correction, revalidates the file and releases 5,900 payments by quarter past 10 in the morning, leaving 500 records that need individual customer confirmation. For CHAPS, you decide to hold all payments below 100,000 pounds in the queue, because they can settle later in the day, and to prepare the 38 payments above 500,000 pounds, worth 61 million pounds, for immediate release the moment CHAPS recovers. For dollars, treasury confirms it can sell 18 million euros for dollars by 11 in the morning, which will fund the queue, so you tell the dollar analysts to hold releases until the funds arrive rather than releasing a few and leaving the rest unfunded. At 12 noon CHAPS recovers, but the recovery creates a new risk, because the system is now facing a backlog from every bank in the country. You decide to release your 38 high value CHAPS payments in value order, starting with the largest payment of 7.5 million pounds for a house purchase completion, then the payment of 4.2 million pounds for a corporate acquisition, and then the remaining payments in descending order. You deliberately hold the low value CHAPS payments until 2 in the afternoon, because releasing 2,000 small payments at once would slow the system and risk a second outage. You update customer service with a short statement, and you call the two corporate customers with the largest payments to confirm settlement personally. By 5 in the afternoon the day is closing, and your last job is to prove that the day balanced and to hand over cleanly. The payroll file is fully cleared, with 6,400 payments settled and 500 individual confirmations obtained by phone. All 38 high value CHAPS payments have settled, and the low value CHAPS queue is below 200 items. The dollar account is funded, the queue is cleared, and the closing balance is 6.8 million dollars. You write the handover note with the closing queue counts, the incident reference for the CHAPS outage, the names of the two customers who need a follow up call tomorrow, and the lesson learned, which is to add a sort code validation check to the payroll file intake so the same error cannot happen again.

The scenario starts at 8 in the morning on a Tuesday in London. You are the operations team leader for a bank that processes 1.8 million payments a day. The overnight batch left a backlog of 6,400 payments in the repair queue, worth 38 million pounds, because a file from a large payroll customer contained 6,400 records with an invalid sort code. The CHAPS system has reported a partial outage, with settlement delayed by at least two hours. Your US dollar nostro account with JPMorgan Chase holds 4.2 million dollars, but the queue of dollar payments waiting for release is worth 22 million dollars. Your first decision is what to do in the first thirty minutes, before the morning peak arrives.

Your first step is to stabilise the position and get facts before you act. You call a short huddle at 5 past 8 in the morning, assign four analysts to the payroll file, two analysts to the CHAPS queue and one analyst to the dollar liquidity position. You ask the payroll analysts to confirm whether the sort code error is the same for all 6,400 records, which would allow a bulk fix, or whether each record needs individual checking. You ask the CHAPS analysts to list every CHAPS payment above 500,000 pounds and its value date, so you know which customers face a real deadline. You call treasury at quarter past 8 in the morning to ask for a dollar funding plan, and you log the incident with technology so the CHAPS outage is formally tracked.

By half past 9 in the morning the facts are clearer and you can make the first hard choices. The payroll error is the same transposed sort code in all 6,400 records, so the team applies a bulk correction, revalidates the file and releases 5,900 payments by quarter past 10 in the morning, leaving 500 records that need individual customer confirmation. For CHAPS, you decide to hold all payments below 100,000 pounds in the queue, because they can settle later in the day, and to prepare the 38 payments above 500,000 pounds, worth 61 million pounds, for immediate release the moment CHAPS recovers. For dollars, treasury confirms it can sell 18 million euros for dollars by 11 in the morning, which will fund the queue, so you tell the dollar analysts to hold releases until the funds arrive rather than releasing a few and leaving the rest unfunded.

At 12 noon CHAPS recovers, but the recovery creates a new risk, because the system is now facing a backlog from every bank in the country. You decide to release your 38 high value CHAPS payments in value order, starting with the largest payment of 7.5 million pounds for a house purchase completion, then the payment of 4.2 million pounds for a corporate acquisition, and then the remaining payments in descending order. You deliberately hold the low value CHAPS payments until 2 in the afternoon, because releasing 2,000 small payments at once would slow the system and risk a second outage. You update customer service with a short statement, and you call the two corporate customers with the largest payments to confirm settlement personally.

By 5 in the afternoon the day is closing, and your last job is to prove that the day balanced and to hand over cleanly. The payroll file is fully cleared, with 6,400 payments settled and 500 individual confirmations obtained by phone. All 38 high value CHAPS payments have settled, and the low value CHAPS queue is below 200 items. The dollar account is funded, the queue is cleared, and the closing balance is 6.8 million dollars. You write the handover note with the closing queue counts, the incident reference for the CHAPS outage, the names of the two customers who need a follow up call tomorrow, and the lesson learned, which is to add a sort code validation check to the payroll file intake so the same error cannot happen again.

Full lesson text (all scenes)

Completing a lesson updates your progress dashboard on the homepage.

Scene timestamps are estimated by allocating the narration text proportionally across the real audio length. The audio playback position is the source of truth: pause freezes the visual, seeking restores the correct scene, replay restarts the scene animation.