A prioritizing system and method are disclosed for prioritizing processing of payment instructions through a payment instruction processing system of a business entity. The method includes identifying a first set of rules determining a prioritization among a set of payment instructions. These include payment instructions related to payments from nostro accounts associated with the business entity and processed by other business entities. Also, the payment instructions have data fields for qualitative and quantitative attributes describing the payment instructions. The method also includes holding and ordering the payment instructions in a queue, determining a first sequence ordering the payment instructions in the queue based upon the first set of rules, and initiating processing of the payment instructions in the queue according to the first sequence.