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The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) published a brief that highlights key payment trends as observed in the 2022 Red Book statistics (available at the BIS Data Portal). These statistics were collected in the second half of 2023 from CPMI member jurisdictions. The use of digital payment methods continues to increase, particularly for small amounts. In tandem, cash withdrawals and the number of small-denomination banknotes in circulation have declined. Fast payments reached new heights and are a prominent driver of the digitalisation of countries' payment ecosystems. Even so, consumers continue to use cash to pay at home and abroad: both cross-border card and e-money payments and cross-border cash withdrawals increased sharply in 2022. (Data portal: https://data.bis.org/topics?topicFilter=CPMI)

The IMF published a Fintech Note on key findings from the Sub-Saharan Africa CBDC and Digital Payments Survey, shedding light on the motivations, benefits, and challenges of CBDC adoption, as well as the developments of digital private money and crypto assets in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 75% of the 33 central banks surveyed are engaged in-or are planning to engage in-CBDC research or pilot activities. Of these, roughly two-thirds are in the research phase, and slightly over one-third are planning to conclude their CBDC pilot programs within the next two years. More than a quarter are actively preparing to launch a CBDC by 2028, although legal challenges pose major hurdles to getting to that point. Financial inclusion, efficiency in domestic payments and facilitating remittances are the most dominant motivations for CBDC adoption. Fast payment systems and e-Money (such as mobile money) are considered as quick wins in sub-Saharan Africa, and about two-thirds of countries are in the process of implementing or considering fast payment systems that are mostly accessible through mobile phones or the internet.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) published a report on the benefits, design choices and challenges associated with linking fast payment systems (FPSs) across countries. It finds that connecting FPSs has the potential to considerably improve the speed and transparency of cross-border payments, benefiting both end users and service providers. Crucial to realizing these benefits are well-designed governance, scheme rules and payments processing capabilities, which help to manage risk and ensure a seamless cross-border payments experience. However, establishing an interlinking arrangement poses challenges, including dealing with differences in legal and regulatory frameworks across participating jurisdictions and agreeing on governance arrangements and scheme rules

Brunei Darussalam Central Bank (BDCB) and Bank of the Lao PDR (BOL) have officially joined the ASEAN Regional Payment Connectivity (RPC). The group now has eight member countries. RPC is an initiative that aims to promote, faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive cross-border payments through, among others, quick response (QR) code-based payment and fast payment modalities.

The BIS published a paper that lays out the main design features of fast payment systems (FPS) that may foster adoption. Cross-country regressions suggest that adoption of fast payments is greater when the public sector plays an active role in the FPS. Other design factors important for adoption are non-bank participation, more use cases and more cross-border connections.

The Clearing House and PYMNTS.com updated their map of the countries that have adopted, and are expected to soon adopt, fast payment systems. They currently count over 90 countries that have implemented fast payment systems.

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) published its work program and strategic priorities for its 2024/25. The program's key themes include the enhancement of cross-border payments, with a particular emphasis on the interlinking of fast payment systems, and digital innovations in payments, clearing and settlement. The latter will include tokenization in the context of money and payments, functionality of cross-border central bank digital currencies and central bank collaboration, and multicurrency and asset-linked stablecoin arrangements. https://www.bis.org/press/p240523.htm

SWIFT does more than cross-border messaging! The diagram below shows how SWIFT Real-Time Retail Payments Systems (RT RPS) work.

Société Universitaire Européenne de Recherches Financières (SUERF) published a note that draws lessons from the success of India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It argues that this success majorly owes to ease of development of applications, easy use and zero-transaction fees for end-users. Further success factors have been strict data protection rules, active partnership with the private sector and adept regulation. The note also discusses the organization of the Indian payment market since the launch of UPI, and the changes in digital payment market in India, with a focus on payment volumes and values. It highlights the increasing investments in the payments market and increased adoption over time, and provides insights into the implications of payment systems for financial inclusion in India, and touches upon some challenges UPI faces.

The IMF published a paper that proposes a framework for comparing retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) with fast payment systems (FPSs) and e-money systems from a payments perspective. A jurisdiction's evaluation will be dependent on the distinct features and capacity of its current, and emerging, financial landscape. A landscape review is an important tool for central banks when assessing how policy objectives are being achieved today, and if necessary pre-conditions for new systems are in place, or could be established in future. Authorities' capacity and capability to not only implement but supervise and regulate any system will be important. Any new system will have non-negligible costs, and different systems will potentially have different implications for the distribution of costs between the public and private sectors. Furthermore, a jurisdiction's mandate and ability to apply their powers around payments may ultimately determine how well any system can fulfill its objectives. Given the early stage of CBDC development, no singular strategy exists in the context of the questions put forward. While central banks will make choices unique to their circumstances, it remains important for central banks to establish a strategy that allows them at minimum to monitor trends and core benefits of multiple solutions as developments occur to allow them to plan, adapt, and drive developments in their payments landscape.

Qatar Central Bank (QCB) launched a "Request to Pay" option through Fawran instant payment service that was launched in March 2024. Request to Pay allows customers to send a payment request from the payee to the payer. The payer will then receive the request, including the payee's name, the required amount to be transferred and the option to accept or reject the request. In case of acceptance, the required amount will be transferred instantly to the payee's account. The participating banks are Doha Bank, Qatar Islamic Bank, Commercial Bank, Masraf Al Rayan and Qatar International Islamic Bank. https://x.com/QCBQATAR/status/1818149749276450924

On May 9th, 2024, the US Federal Reserve System announced that it was "seeking input" on a proposal to expand the operating hours of two "wholesale" payment services it operates, Fedwire Funds Service (h"Fedwire") and the National Settlement Service (NSS). Wholesale payment services are responsible for transferring direct liabilities of central banks between financial institutions, particularly, in value terms, for the settlement of interbank dues. At present Fedwire and the NSS only transfer funds on weekdays, excluding holidays. The proposed expansion would have them run 22 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included. This paper by George Selgin explains those potential gains. It then surveys the Fed's repeated postponement, over the course of almost a decade, of plans to provide for weekend and holiday Fedwire and NSS operating hours, arguing that in delaying for so long the Fed has neglected its duty, as the United States' monopoly provider of wholesale settlement services, to adapt those services to changing needs.

Sveriges Riksbank published an independent assessment of the Swedish payments system, aiming to gaps in available services and to suggest some possible directions/opportunities for the system's evolution. It concluded that enabling a wider range of instant (or real-time) account-to-account payments should be a high priority for banks and the payments industry, in addition to the work underway to modernize Swedish bulk/batch payments. Also, the report recommends that, "although the case for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) is probably stronger in Sweden than in most other advanced economies", the best strategy for the Riksbank is to step back but be ready to be a "fast follower" of a digital euro launch, "possibly either using the European Central Bank's infrastructure or borrowing heavily from its design".

The European Central Bank (ECB) and Norges Bank signed an agreement for Norway to join the Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) service. This will make the Norwegian krone the fourth currency available for settlement in TIPS, in addition to the euro, the Swedish krona and the Danish krone, which is scheduled to join in April 2025. The inclusion of the Norwegian krone in TIPS, which is part of the Eurosystem's TARGET Services, is planned for the first half of 2028 and will enable market participants in Norway to settle payments instantly, around the clock and in central bank money.

The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Digital Monetary Institute (DMI) published its annual Future of Payments report, based on a survey of 34 central banks, 13 from advanced and 21 from emerging market economies. It found that platforms based on multi-currency central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are emerging as alternatives to existing cross-border payments systems, with Project mBridge being the most advanced, although liquidity issues and governance concerns still pose limitations for widespread adoption. CBDC interoperability will be a key consideration for global payments going forward, with a hub-and-spoke model being favored by survey respondents. Standardization (e.g., migrating to ISO 20022 standards) is helping to reduce the costs and frictions in cross-border payments, but implementation is patchy. However, instant payments systems are rapidly growing in importance, with 47% of survey respondents selecting it as the most promising avenue for improving cross-border payments.

The World Bank published a technical paper on on its practical experiments on fast payments system (FPS) interoperability with central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems. The first experiment investigated the option of settling FPS obligations in a wholesale CBDC system, including the option to reserve funds to guarantee the settlement of FPS net obligations. The second experiment investigated the interoperability between users within the FPS and retail CBDC users, including the transfer of funds among both types of users, using common services such as address resolution services. This experiment illustrated how CBDC systems could interoperate with retail payment systems through an interlinking bridge that was used to route messages and application programming interface (API) calls among different systems. The programmability features of distributed ledger technology (DLT) were used to link the settlement in CBDC to the transfer of funds in the FPS.

Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) has pushed back the addition of recurring payments to its Pix instant payment platform from October 2024 until June 2025. Automatic Pix will facilitate recurring charges that let users authorize periodic debits automatically, without the need for authentication for each transaction. The BCB also published amended Pix regulations that limit transactions on access devices that are unregistered or that have never been used to initiate a Pix transaction to R$200 and R$1,000 per day. The amendments will become effective on November 1, 2024.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published two Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) reports that offer key insights and recommendations on the interlinking and interoperability of payment systems to enhance cross-border payments. The first report discusses design choices and the risk implications of interlinked fast payment systems (FPSs) and the role of application programming interfaces (APIs), setting out the key decisions for governance and outlines recommendations for their oversight. The second report presents ten recommendations to promote the harmonization of APIs to enhance cross-border payments. https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d223.htm https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d224.htm

Along with the aforementioned Project Ensemble collaborations, the HKMA provided updates on its other initiatives to spearhead the journey of fintech development in Hong Kong. The HKMA will collaborate with other members of the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust on interoperability aspects of DLT-based FMIs in the Ensemble Sandbox. Also, the HKMA has completed the initial phase of six tokenization use cases across four main themes under Project Ensemble and will publish a report detailing the results of the experimentation in 2025. The HKMA is working closely with the People's Bank of China to establish a cross-boundary linkage between Hong Kong's Faster Payment System (FPS) and the Mainland's Internet Banking Payment System (IBPS). This linkage will support 24/7, instant, small-value, cross-boundary remittances using account proxies like mobile numbers. A pilot launch is expected to be around mid-2025 tentatively.

The five Project Nexus central bank partners (India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) established the Singapore-based Nexus Scheme Organization (NSO) managing entity, which will manage the project in its live implementation stages. Nexus was launched in 2021 by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub to enhance cross-border payments by connecting multiple domestic instant payment systems (IPS) globally. The European Central Bank (ECB) also joined Nexus as a special observer as part of exploratory work on linking its TARGET Instant Payment Settlement with other fast payment systems. While the BIS will not own or operate the NSO, it will continue its support by playing a technical advisory role.