In order to reduce participants’ liquidity requirements, the settlement of instructions has therefore been separated from the resultant payment flows. This enables the instructions to be settled individually on a gross basis (gross settlement), while at the same the resultant payment obligations are netted. As a consequence, only the balances of the netted claims and liabilities, i.e. participants’ respective net positions, are transferred via the system (net funding). Participants’ liquidity requirements can be significantly reduced in this way. Because of the multilateral netting procedure used, the payment flows actually transferred between participants only amount to around 2% of the gross amounts actually settled.