A Practitioner’s Guide to Governance of Fast Payment Systems

Retail fast payments across payment service providers allow for immediate fund availability to beneficiaries and can be used on a 24/7/365 basis. As fast payment systems (FPS) evolve, they enable a diverse set of payment service providers, including banks and non-banks, and support a variety of payment instruments, use cases (domestic and cross-border), transaction channels, and overlay services. The “G20 Policy Recommendations for Advancing Financial Inclusion and Productivity Gains through Digital Public Infrastructure” has identified FPS as one of the three digital public infrastructures (DPIs) in advancing financial inclusion. FPSs are proliferating worldwide in both advanced and emerging economies.

Ensuring that FPSs are well-governed is becoming a key policy concern for central banks and economic policy makers worldwide, as it can significantly impact the financial health of a national economy. However, setting up the best possible governance framework can be challenging: the issues are complex and interdependent, the community of affected stakeholders is large and diverse, the technology evolves quickly, and no two financial ecosystems are exactly alike. This guide is aimed at policy makers and system managers tasked with the challenge of setting up a governance framework for FSPs.