The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) has outlined its strategy to improve the security of wholesale payments that involve banks, financial market infrastructures and other financial information.

The new document is aimed at focusing industry efforts to tackle the increasing threat of wholesale payments fraud.

The strategy was developed by a CPMI task force set up in 2016 and led by Lawrence Sweet of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Johan Pissens of the National Bank of Belgium.

It sets out seven elements designed to address all areas relevant to preventing, detecting, responding to and communicating about wholesale payments fraud. It stresses the importance of understanding the full range of risks and calls upon all relevant public and private sector stakeholders to take a holistic and coordinated approach.

The stocktaking of current practices undertaken by the task force revealed knowledge gaps and inconsistent approaches among other weaknesses. As a result, potentially important opportunities to strengthen the wholesale payment ecosystem were identified.

CPMI Chairman Benoît Cœuré said: “Wholesale payments fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated and is expected to evolve further. We need to move fast, and together, to guard against any loss of confidence in the system.”

The CPMI is now seeking input from relevant stakeholders. After the consultation, it plans to develop guidance on each of the seven elements to help operators and participants of payment systems and messaging networks as well as their respective supervisors, regulators and overseers improve endpoint security. The proposed guidance will be developed by early 2018.

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