For the first time, the UK’s primary payment systems – CHAPS, Faster Payments and Bacs – will be using the same messaging standard. This will be a major step towards interoperability of the UK payment systems and should facilitate improved contingency arrangements for critical and time sensitive payments as described above. And ISO20022 messages will contain richer data in payments, ensuring that PSPs can easily identify and prioritise the most critical payments for processing during contingency scenarios. In the last few days we have received the industry feedback on our like-for-like schemas for CHAPS, the final version of which will be published in December alongside more information on our transition approach. The schema for the enhanced messages will be published towards the end of 2020, aiming to cut over to the ISO messages in the first half of 2022. Conclusion 15  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/report/2019/sector-simulation-exercise-simex-2018-report 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  7  There is a significant amount of work underway to ensure the continued resilience of the UK’s payments infrastructure. And this work must continue, both practical activities such as testing, and also the development and promotion of standards. Given the network nature of payments, this is not something the Bank of England can undertake in isolation. It is a journey we are on with many of you here today – the financial institutions that use CHAPS and RTGS to provide critical payment services to customers.
The UK’s payment systems (including retail payment systems such as Faster Payments and Bacs, and the high value system – CHAPS) connect payment service providers (PSPs) together, as a means of moving money between them. It is therefore vital that the organisations that manage the payment systems dedicate a lot of time to enhancing operational resilience and cyber security. And innovations, including instant payments, will also benefit from a resilient foundation. The Bank’s operation of RTGS, and more recently CHAPS, makes a vital contribution to our overarching mission of maintaining monetary and financial stability. CHAPS is the UK’s high value payment system and settles an average of £ billion each working day, representing 93% of non-cash payments in the UK by 1  https://www.assetnews.com/fintech/europe-trumps-asia-fintech-funding-q2-2019 https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/pdf/UK-Finance-UK-Payment-Markets-Report-2019-SUMMARY.pdf https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2019/payments-a-platform-for-innovation-speech-by-victoriacleland.pdf?la=en&hash=5841227A82F5C75B75FFE32027EEF5EDA61D2C70 4 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/report/2019/future-of-finance 5 https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/research/technology-cyber-resilience-questionnaire-cross-sector-report.pdf 6 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/prudential-regulation/discussion-paper/2018/dp118.pdf 2 3  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  2  value. RTGS is the infrastructure where the key UK payments systems – including CHAPS – ultimately settle, supporting stability across the broader financial system. The area of the Bank that I lead (Banking, Payments and Innovation) has provided real-time settlement through our RTGS infrastructure since 1996. In 2017, as part of our vision to enhance stability, we took the step of bringing the management and operation of CHAPS into the Bank (until then the CHAPS payment scheme was operated by a private sector company – CHAPS Co). The Bank understood and mitigated the risks within RTGS, and CHAPS Co looked at risks in its participants.