GRA · Payments and Market Infrastructure
Spatial financeWhere capital meets hazard, exposure and transition
Payments and Market Infrastructure
Operational resilience of clearing, settlement, payment systems and financial market utilities. Payments and Market Infrastructure is an established platform of The Global Risks Alliance.
- STEM methods
- 6
- Canonical methods this field applies
- Topics
- 8
- Subject pages in the field
- Counterparts
- 5
- Platforms in shared fields across the network
- Report series
- 2
- Reports series it contributes to
The workspace for Payments and Market Infrastructure.
RTGS operations console
RTGS system · Business day 180 · Example interface, not a record
- Value settled today45local bnActive
- Payments queued17965Watch
- Availability, % this month100.0Normal
- Participants below liquidity floor2Alert
Intraday liquidity, system
Incident and failover log
- 09:23INCParticipant P-12 message delay
- 10:18LSMLiquidity saving cycle released 64 payments
- 14:00CUTCustomer payment cut-off
- Q2TESTContingency site failover in 53 min
Payments and Market Infrastructure · RTGS operations console. RTGS operations console: example names and illustrative values, not a record.
What the work is read against.
The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.
| Framework or standard | Body | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI) | Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and IOSCO | International standards for payment systems, central securities depositories, securities settlement systems, central counterparties and trade repositories |
| Guidance on cyber resilience for financial market infrastructures | CPMI and IOSCO | Expectations for governance, identification, protection, detection, response and recovery, including resumption of critical operations |
| G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments | Financial Stability Board with CPMI and other bodies | Targets for the cost, speed, access and transparency of cross-border payments and the actions to reach them |
| ISO 20022 financial messaging standard | International Organization for Standardization | A common data model and message format for payments and securities, used by major payment systems |
| Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) | European Union | ICT risk management, incident reporting, resilience testing including threat-led penetration testing, and oversight of critical ICT third-party providers |
| Guidance on CCP resilience, recovery and resolution | CPMI-IOSCO and the Financial Stability Board | Expectations for CCP stress testing, margin, recovery tools and resolution planning |
| FSB toolkit for third-party risk management and oversight | Financial Stability Board | Common terminology and tools for financial institutions and authorities to manage third-party and concentration risk |
| Post-quantum cryptography standards (FIPS 203, 204 and 205) | US National Institute of Standards and Technology | Standardised key encapsulation and signature algorithms intended to resist attack by quantum computers |
How a shock to assets becomes a system loss.
The equity the system loses after interbank contagion, against the initial hit, as leverage, interconnection and recovery rates change, the core of a macroprudential stress test. Teaching model with stated illustrative values, not a prediction.
Controls
- Fall in external assets
- 2.0%
- Leverage (assets over equity)
- 10 times
- Interbank share of assets
- 10%
- Recovery on interbank claims
- 40%
- Banks in the system
- 20
- Core banks
- 20% of banks
Readouts
- Equity lost to the initial shock
- 18.0%
- Equity lost after contagion
- 45.0%
- Added by contagion (DebtRank)
- 27.0 points
- Banks in default
- 0
Numbers, methods and sources
| Round | System equity lost (%) | Banks in default |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 18.00 | 0 |
| 1 | 28.80 | 0 |
| 2 | 35.28 | 0 |
| 3 | 39.17 | 0 |
| 4 | 41.50 | 0 |
| 5 | 42.90 | 0 |
| 6 | 43.74 | 0 |
| 7 | 44.24 | 0 |
| 8 | 44.55 | 0 |
| 9 | 44.73 | 0 |
| 10 | 44.84 | 0 |
| 11 | 44.90 | 0 |
| 12 | 44.94 | 0 |
| 13 | 44.96 | 0 |
| 14 | 44.98 | 0 |
| 15 | 44.99 | 0 |
| 16 | 44.99 | 0 |
| 17 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 18 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 19 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 20 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 21 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 22 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 23 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 24 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 25 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 26 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 27 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 28 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 29 | 45.00 | 0 |
| 30 | 45.00 | 0 |
Methods
- DebtRank Battiston and others (2012), Scientific Reports 2:541
- Differential DebtRank Bardoscia and others (2015), PLOS ONE 10
- Contagion in financial networks Gai and Kapadia (2010), Proc. R. Soc. A 466
- Clearing in financial networks Eisenberg and Noe (2001), Management Science 47
- Uncertainty fan (parameter Monte Carlo) Spiegelhalter, Pearson and Short (2011), Visualising uncertainty about the future, Science 333
- One-at-a-time sensitivity (tornado) Saltelli and others (2008), Global Sensitivity Analysis: The Primer, Wiley
Data
No observed data enters this model: it runs on the teaching values set by the controls, to be replaced with a programme’s own evidence.
Across the six pillars, led by Nexus Consortium
- Experiments Labs
- Built in Payments and Market Infrastructure in Foundry
- Tested at Payments and Market Infrastructure in Universe
- Codified in Finance, Insurance and the Economy in Standards
- Published in Payments and Market Infrastructure in Reports
- Taught in Faculty of Finance and Economics in Academy
The questions this field works on.
Retail and wholesale payments
Payment rails and economic continuity.
TopicClearing and settlement
Settlement exposures and infrastructure.
TopicCentral counterparty risk
CCPs, collateral and liquidity.
TopicCross border payments
Interoperability and failure modes.
TopicPayment cyber security
Operational integrity and threat exposure.
TopicThird party concentration
Cloud, identity and outsourced systems.
TopicCash and digital resilience
Fallbacks and financial access.
TopicOperational test methods
Failure exercises and recovery assumptions.
What Payments and Market Infrastructure means for exposure, loss and capital.
The exposure, loss, scenario and capital views a risk officer, supervisor or ministry of finance would ask for, with the frameworks they report against. Structures follow supervisory and actuarial practice. Values are illustrative: never prices, ratings or advice.
Transmission channels
How a shock in Payments and Market Infrastructure reaches credit, market, underwriting, liquidity and operational risk, and feeds back.
Scenario pathways
How Payments and Market Infrastructure could be stressed under the scenario families central banks and supervisors use.
| Scenario family | Transition risk | Physical risk | What a stress test asks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orderly | Early, gradual policy | Lower | Can the book absorb a steady repricing? |
| Disorderly | Late, abrupt policy | Lower to medium | What breaks under a sudden repricing and credit migration? |
| Hot house world | Limited policy | High and rising | Where do physical losses concentrate in collateral and insurance? |
What Payments and Market Infrastructure does.
Payments and market infrastructure are the systems that move money and settle trades: payment systems, central securities depositories, settlement systems and central counterparties. Global Risks Alliance’s platform explains how they concentrate and transmit operational, cyber, credit and liquidity risk, how resilience is tested and who decides. It does not operate or assess any system.
Its community
Payment-system researchers; FMI professionals; settlement technologists.
Its methods
Critical function mapping; dependency and outage analysis.
Its outputs
FMI resilience guides; payment concentration studies.
When the plumbing stops, the whole economy notices.
Financial market infrastructures (FMIs) are the systems through which payments, securities and derivatives are cleared, settled and recorded. They are rarely visible, but wages, pensions, supplier payments, card purchases, securities trades and central bank operations all depend on them.
A modern economy runs on layers of infrastructure. Retail payment systems process card, account-to-account and mobile payments; large-value systems, often operated by central banks, settle interbank obligations in central bank money; securities settlement systems and central securities depositories transfer ownership of securities; central counterparties stand between buyers and sellers in many markets; and trade repositories record derivatives. These systems are linked to each other and to banks, payment service providers, messaging networks, cloud providers and telecommunications.
Because FMIs concentrate activity, their failure has systemic consequences. An outage in a large-value payment system can leave banks unable to make payments, creating liquidity shortfalls that spread through the system. A cyber attack on a widely used provider can halt payments across sectors. Stress at a central counterparty during extreme market moves can force large, sudden demands for collateral that drain liquidity from members and markets. Even a few hours of disruption can affect wages, supply chains and confidence.
Resilience is challenged by change as well as shocks. Instant payments operate around the clock, removing the overnight window that once allowed recovery. Dependence on a few technology providers is growing. New technologies such as distributed ledgers and tokenised assets, and the prospect of quantum computers capable of breaking current cryptography, raise new questions about how infrastructures will remain safe.
Shared understanding of critical functions and dependencies.
The platform builds a common, industry-wide picture of how financial market infrastructures can fail and how they recover, using published and aggregated evidence.
What must continue
Mapping of the functions that payment and market infrastructures provide to the economy and the dependencies behind each one.
Where concentration sits
Analysis of shared providers, links between infrastructures and the paths through which outages and stress propagate.
How failure unfolds
Study of published incidents and scenarios to understand failure modes, recovery times and fallback arrangements.
GRA is a nonprofit business league for the financial services industry. It does not lend, underwrite, rate, invest, advise on or arrange transactions, introduce counterparties or take transaction-based pay, and readiness work is not approval. GRA does not operate, connect to or test any live payment system, and it assesses no individual institution.
Science and governance counterparts at the other institutions.
The platform stewards the method page for payment and financial market technology and applies network science and contagion, reliability and resilience engineering, cybersecurity and cryptography, distributed ledgers and digital assets and quantum computing, sensing and communication, listed on the platform STEM foundation. It draws on the Foundry systems NXS-NET (network topology and continuity), NXS-SIG (signal, spectrum, timing and PNT) and NXS-NSF (trust, authorisation and assurance), and contributes to the Strategic Systems and Scenario and Stress-Test series.
The underlying science is done at The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI), with Cybersecurity and Digital Resilience, Quantum Technologies and Digital Public Infrastructure. At the Global Risks Forum (GRF), Capital Nexus and AI and Digital Governance convene governance dialogue on capital and digital technology. Within GRA, the platform works with Financial Cyber and Operational Resilience, Fintech Nexus and Financial Stability. See counterparts across the Consortium.
A payment system outage is the platform’s theme in the Universe programme, exercised as a simulated learning case that touches no live system.
The areas of financial stability this platform takes on.
Payments and Market Infrastructure studies the systems that move money and settle trades: retail and wholesale payment systems, central securities depositories, securities settlement, central counterparties and the networks that link them across borders. These systems concentrate risk by design, so their failure would stop activity across the economy. Its pages set out how operational, cyber, credit and liquidity risk arise and spread, how resilience is tested, and who decides. Global Risks Alliance shares industry understanding and does not operate, assess or certify any infrastructure.
Retail and wholesale payments
Card, account-to-account, instant and large-value payment systems, and the settlement assets they use.
Clearing and settlement
Securities settlement, central securities depositories, settlement cycles and delivery-versus-payment.
Central counterparties
How CCPs manage default risk through margin, default funds and recovery and resolution arrangements.
Cross-border payments
Correspondent banking, messaging standards, interlinking of fast payment systems and the G20 targets for cost, speed, access and transparency.
Payment cyber security
Threats to payment and settlement systems, endpoint security and recovery from cyber attack.
Third-party concentration
Dependence of infrastructures and participants on cloud, messaging and technology providers.
Cash and digital resilience
The role of cash, offline payments and central bank money when digital channels fail.
Operational testing
Scenario testing, recovery testing, red-teaming and market-wide exercises for infrastructures.
Built on named science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Every claim on Payments and Market Infrastructure rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.
See the STEM foundation of Payments and Market Infrastructure
How work moves in this field.
A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organised community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.
- Question Universe National, regional or institutional priority. Question in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Evidence Foundry STEM foundation of the platform. Evidence in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Build Foundry Foundry. Build in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Organise Universe Nexus ecosystem. Organise in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Test Universe Universe (independent site). Test in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Publish Reports Reports. Publish in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Decide Competent authority Competent authorities and institutions, through NXS-RLS (participants, agreements and handoffs). Decide in Payments and Market Infrastructure
- Renew Universe Corrections and the next annual agenda. Renew in Payments and Market Infrastructure
Each step of the cycle in the pillar it runs in; the decision stays with the competent authority, outside the programme.
- Labs
- Foundry
- Universe
- Nexus Standards
- Reports
- Risk Academy
- Competent authority (outside the programme)
How this works across the six pillars.
Payments and Market Infrastructure works through six pillars of one annual programme, led by the Nexus Consortium, with GCRI, GRF and GRA each contributing in its role: explore, experiment and prototype in Labs, build, simulate and prepare in Foundry, convene and test in Universe, codify, correct and apply in Nexus Standards, publish in every format in Reports, teach in the open in Risk Academy.
handoff in playrecorded handoffno direct handoff
Programme yearAll phases
Route
The whole programme
Every pillar hands its work to another; together they close the year’s feedback loops.
L · F · U · S · R · A
- Pillars
- 6 of 6
- Handoffs
- 18 of 18
- Loops
- 17 closed
Handoffs in play
- F01Universe → Foundry · Admitted mission becomes a cycle project with a decision caseReadiness preparation
- F02Foundry → Universe · Core Build Report and go or no-go evidenceControlled build
- F03Foundry → Reports · Sealed observations and indicator series behind a profileCloseout
- F04Universe → Reports · After-action and scenario findings for chapters 10 and 13After-action review
and 14 more
- LabsWhere questions become experiments and prototypes: new methods, data and tools are tried in the open, with their limits on record, before the Foundry builds them, under the Nexus Consortium.Labs
- FoundryWhere exposure and scenario evidence is built so supervisors, insurers and investors can read it.Payments and Market Infrastructure in FoundryFoundry
- UniverseWhere scenarios are tested in controlled exercises, and finance-readiness dialogues read what they mean for capital and cover.Payments and Market Infrastructure in Universeuniverse.nexus
- Nexus StandardsWhere disclosure and data rules are codified so risk evidence is comparable for finance and insurance.Finance, Insurance and the Economy in Standardsnexustandards.com
- ReportsWhere sector analysis and the finance and insurance readiness series are published, with exposure and limits stated.Payments and Market Infrastructure in ReportsReports
- Risk AcademyWhere finance, insurance and public-finance professionals learn to read risk evidence, on Risk Academy.Faculty of Finance and Economics in Academyrisksacademy.com
The same field, seen three ways.
GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Payments and Market Infrastructure links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.
- Cybersecurity and Digital ResilienceInstitutionGCRIShared fieldCyber and digital resilience
- Quantum TechnologiesInstitutionGCRIShared fieldCyber and digital resilience
- Digital Public InfrastructureInstitutionGCRIShared fieldDigital public infrastructure, Cyber and digital resilience
- Capital NexusInstitutionGRFShared fieldFinancial stability
- AI and Digital GovernanceInstitutionGRFShared fieldDigital public infrastructure, Cyber and digital resilience
Pages in Payments and Market Infrastructure.
Industry scope and publisher
PageFinancial discipline overview
PageProfessional research
PageTechnology and emerging practices
PageResilience and finance readiness
PageResearch and industry programmes
PageAnalytical and data resources
PageProfessional community
PageProfessional learning
PageProfessional meetings
PageReports and sector briefs
PageMembership and research participation
PageContact the industry platform
PageAntitrust, independence and financial perimeter
PageSTEM foundation of Payments and Market Infrastructure
PageHow work moves in this field
PageBuild in Foundry
PageTest in Universe
PagePublish in Reports
PageThe same field across the Consortium
PageTopics
Where this page leads across the Consortium.
Questions and answers.
Who publishes Payments and Market Infrastructure?
Is Payments and Market Infrastructure active?
How can I contribute?
Where are findings published?
Which values on this platform are real?
How do I report an error?
Does GRA oversee payment systems?
Who is the platform for?
Contribute evidence from this page.
Reports is the Consortium’s quarterly publication. What you know about this subject can become evidence, a case or a correction in the next edition, credited to you and published under CC BY 4.0 where it is your own work.
- EmailGateway GW-GRASend it from this pageEvidence, a correction, a case, a method, a review, a translation or profile input. It arrives tagged with this page, so the editor who owns it receives it.
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Never send personal data, sensitive infrastructure detail or anything you have no right to share. A contribution is reviewed before use; sending it confers no authorship or editorial rights, and sponsorship never buys a finding.
How Payments and Market Infrastructure works.
Choose a view and press Play to follow the platform’s process, its programme year, the standards it applies and how its findings are published. The outline shows how the work is designed to run, not the status of any decision.
Payments and Market Infrastructure
How Payments and Market Infrastructure works
Platforms · Programme year · Standards · Reports
A platform joins a field to named methods, labelled evidence and the outputs it publishes, without becoming the authority it serves.
01 Scope
- 01Field and familiesStart · The platform leadThe home states the field, its families and who it serves.
- 02Topic dossiersRecord · Platform authorsTopics explain the subject with labelled evidence.
02 Evidence
- 03Evidence labelsRecord · GCRIEach value is labelled: observed, published statistics, estimated, modelled, scenario or unknown.
- 04MethodsStep · Method ownersMethods come from the STEM Commons, each with one canonical page.
03 Work
- 05Scenarios on the systemsModel · Foundry pillarScenarios run on the Nexus systems, labelled as scenario.
- 06Standards that applyRecord · Nexus StandardsThe platform names the standards that apply. A validator report is evidence for review.
04 Publish
- 07EditionsRecord · ReportsFindings are published through Reports with their limits.
- 08Authority decidesOutcome · The competent authorityDecisions and execution stay with the government, operator or licensed institution.
Payments and Market Infrastructure home · Platforms · Shared methodsAn outline of how the work is designed to run; it does not report the status of any decision or record.
Take part in Payments and Market Infrastructure.
Start from who you are. Answer an open call. Or form and lead a competence cell on the Payments and Market Infrastructure platform.
National institutions
Ministries, statistics offices and agencies: a national desk and chapter, and a seat in the working groups. National chapters
Sectors and professions
Operators, regulators, banks, insurers and professional bodies whose work touches Payments and Market Infrastructure. Participate
Learning
Courses and practice, with a record of every course completed. Free to study. Open learning
Standards
Draft, review and adopt the methods and data standards with the working groups. Working groups
Communities and research
Universities, civil society and individual experts: projects, data and review. Write to the team
| Open call | Seeks | Closes |
|---|---|---|
| Founding call for experts to the working groups CALL-FOUNDING-EXPERTS | expert, editor, chair | 2026-12-15 |
| Open nomination for the three independent expert seats of the Global Standards Council CALL-GSC-IND | council-member | 2026-12-01 |
| Nominations of interim regional members (applies only if the transitional provision is decided) CALL-GSC-REG | council-member | 2026-12-15 |
| Review of the wave-1 risk core outlines (C1, C2, C3, C4, C8, C10, C11) CALL-REVIEW-WAVE1 | contributor | 2027-01-31 |
| Experts for the core standards of risk science: uncertainty and evidence grading, scales, structured expert judgement, tolerability, extremes and compound events, catastrophic and existential risk, ethics and equity, units and measurement (NRS-C17 to NRS-C24) CALL-CORE-SCIENCE | expert, editor, chair | 2027-01-31 |
| Independent reviewers for the families of the hazard atlas, three from at least two regions for each family (NHS2-R19), priority families first CALL-ATLAS-REVIEW | expert | 2027-03-31 |
| Members of the interim Frontier Safety Review Panel and red-team reviewers (biosafety and biosecurity, AI safety and security, critical-infrastructure security); applications treated in confidence CALL-FRONTIER-SAFETY-REVIEW | expert | 2026-11-30 |
| Experts in ontology, metrology, software verification and conformity assessment for the requirement register, the NHS-2 machine representation, the conformance test suites and the conformity assessment scheme CALL-CONFORMANCE-ONTOLOGY | expert, editor | 2027-01-31 |
Calls past their closing date are hidden automatically. Every call, proposal and route: open areas and calls.
Gather the cell
Bring together three to seven people with complementary skills: data, field practice, policy and communication.
Register it
Write to the team with the cell’s name, members, area and region. You receive a reference and a contact. Write to the team
Choose a charter
Pick one focus: research and evidence, data and maps, standards review, or community preparedness.
Learn together
Follow shared study paths at Risk Academy, with practice and a record of every course completed. Hazards and resilience
Lead and report
Hold regular sessions. Publish what the cell learns through Reports. Bring findings to the working groups. Working groups
What a national team or a local community can do on The Global Risks Index (NXS-GRX) today.
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The Index is the Consortium’s indexing system for risk data. Every indicator, hazard, series and country profile carries its Nexus Standards identifier, its source and its licence, so what this page shows can be traced, corrected and reused.
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- 02 · Nexus StandardsNIS-1 and NHS-1451 indicators, 905 hazards; every record carries a UNI.Nexus Standards
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- 04 · This pagePayments and Market InfrastructureMaps, figures and feeds read the Index in the context of hazards, climate, conflict.Public API
Series in this context hazards, climate, conflict
- GLBGlobal SystemsThe state of interdependent global risk: the twenty domain indices aggregated to the world, the five core systems (water, energy, food, health, biodiversity) and their couplings, the global tail register and the gap…NXS-GRX-AR-000002Hazards · Climate · Conflict
- THDisaster Risk Intelligence (DRI)Signals, observations, event streams, geospatial layers and scenario packs turned into structured risk intelligence for preparedness and planning.NXS-GRX-AR-000111Hazards · Climate · Conflict
- GSGlobal CitiesUrban exposure, heat, flooding, informal settlement, service dependency and the economic weight of cities at risk.NXS-GRX-AR-000068Hazards · Infrastructure · Climate
- GSGlobal ClimateChronic and acute physical climate hazard, transition exposure, adaptation gaps and scenario pathways to 2030, 2050 and 2100.NXS-GRX-AR-000065Climate · Hazards · Finance
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Hazard domains NHS-1
- Atmosphere and weatherNXS-GRX-AR-000135
- Solid EarthNXS-GRX-AR-000138
- Systemic and compound eventsNXS-GRX-AR-000148
Geodata and API open
Open layers on an equal-area hexagon grid, shown as densities per km² or as symbols: People · GHSL 2025People · WorldPop 2025Built-up areaPortsAirportsRoadsRailwaysRivers and lake centrelines
/api/v1/public/grix · https://nexustandards.com/uni/{uni}
Developers · Data · Made with Natural Earth, Public domain; GHSL and WorldPop, CC BY 4.0
Snapshot of the Index registries pinned 2026-10-23 · 22c6eed. Research and risk-analytics information: not a rating, an official classification, a warning, a benchmark or advice.
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