Payments and Market Infrastructure
The Global Risks Alliance (GRA)
Payment systems carry everything from card purchases to interbank settlements worth large sums each day. Retail systems handle many small payments; wholesale systems settle large-value payments, usually in central bank money. Each concentrates operational and liquidity risk at a few nodes. This page sets out how payment system risk develops and spreads, how it is measured, and the overseers, operators and participants who decide.
Retail and wholesale payments · RTGS system · Business day 126
Fig.RTGS operations console. Design wireframe with placeholder names and illustrative values, not a record or a live system.
Retail and wholesale payment systems are the arrangements that transfer money between people, firms and banks, from card and instant payments to large-value interbank settlement. They concentrate operational and liquidity risk at a few nodes. Central bank overseers, operators, participants and legislators hold the decisions.
How a failure at one financial centre can spread through settlement links. Design links, not real dependencies.
Payment rails and economic continuity. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Participants need liquidity to send payments before receiving others. If one large participant holds back, others are short and the system can gridlock.
A few systems and settlement banks process most value. An outage at one stops payments for every participant and their customers.
Round-the-clock instant payments leave no batch window for recovery and move funds before fraud checks finish, changing the risk profile.
Settlement in central bank money carries no credit risk; settlement in commercial bank money exposes participants to the settlement bank.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Real-time gross settlement | Settlement of payments individually and immediately in central bank money. |
| Intraday liquidity | Funds a bank can use during the business day to make payments before receiving others. |
| Settlement asset | The asset used to discharge payment obligations, such as central bank or commercial bank money. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value and volume of payments by system | currency and count per year | annual | CPMI Red Book statistics | OFFICIAL |
| System availability | percent of scheduled operating time | monthly | Operator disclosures | DECLARED |
| Intraday liquidity usage | peak use as share of available liquidity | daily | Participant and operator data | REPORTED |
| Payment system outages | count and duration in minutes | per incident | Operator and overseer reports | OFFICIAL |
| Instant payment share of credit transfers | percent | annual | Central bank statistics | OFFICIAL |
| Settlement in central bank money | share of value | annual | Central bank statistics | OFFICIAL |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| CPMI Red Book statistics | Payment, clearing and settlement statistics by country | Free, BIS terms |
| ECB payment statistics | Euro area payment volumes and values | Free, ECB reuse terms |
| Federal Reserve Financial Services and Fedwire statistics | United States wholesale payment volumes | Public domain |
| PFMI disclosure frameworks published by operators | Self-assessments against the PFMI | Public records, terms per operator |
| Bank of England RTGS and CHAPS reports | Operation and resilience of UK high-value payments | Free, Bank of England terms |
Payments and Market Infrastructure prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Central bank overseers | Whether systems meet the PFMI and what remediation is needed | Self-assessments, incidents and availability data |
| System operators' boards | How to invest in resilience and liquidity-saving mechanisms | Incident history and participant behaviour data |
| Participant banks | How much intraday liquidity to hold and how to manage payment timing | Liquidity usage and stress evidence |
| Legislators and regulators | Whether to mandate instant payment access or safeguards | Market and fraud evidence |
Every economic transaction ends in a payment. When retail rails fail, shops cannot sell and people cannot pay; when wholesale rails fail, banks cannot settle and markets seize. The move to instant, round-the-clock payments improves service but leaves less time to recover from problems. Understanding how rails are built and connected is the starting point for keeping the economy running through disruption.
Payment rails differ in speed, value, settlement model and operator.
Card schemes, automated clearing houses and instant payment systems, often settling net positions later in central bank money.
Real-time gross settlement systems settle each payment individually and with finality, usually operated by central banks.
Participants need liquidity to make payments before receiving others. Queuing, liquidity-saving mechanisms and central bank credit help.
Retail and wholesale rails are linked. Retail systems typically settle their net positions in the wholesale system, and banks depend on wholesale settlement to fund retail payments. A problem in either can therefore spread to the other. Mapping these links, and the timing of settlement cycles between them, is central to understanding how a disruption would unfold.
Published volumes, values and availability statistics. Detailed operational data are rarely public.
Published reports of outages and their causes. Detail varies by jurisdiction and operator.
Simulation of payment flows under stress, applying network science and contagion. Requires transaction data usually available only to operators and overseers.
Analysis of system design and dependencies, applying payment and financial market technology.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.