On 25 September 2023, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a report: Stocktake of international data standards relevant to cross-border payments.
The report looks at national and regional data frameworks relevant to the functioning, regulation and supervision of cross-border payment arrangements. Furthermore, the report takes forward one of the priority actions under the G20 Cross-border Payments Roadmap, to enhance the interaction between data frameworks and cross-border payments.
The stocktake was conducted to identify issues relating to cross-border use of data by national authorities and by the private sector in cross-border payment arrangements.
The report identified the following:
- Fragmentation among data framework requirements and their implementation, most notably across the data needed to accompany a cross-border payment transaction.
- Uncertainty among payment providers on how to balance the various obligations under different data frameworks.
- Challenges arising from restrictions on the flow of data across borders.
- Frictions may make innovating in the payment system more challenging.
Work is already underway in the FSB to follow-up on this stocktake and address these issues. In particular, the FSB is developing recommendations to promote alignment and interoperability across data frameworks applicable to cross-border payments.
To inform its work, the FSB will engage with industry, data privacy experts, financial regulators and data protection agencies to develop case studies to assess the impact of selected frictions on cross-border payments and identify where actions should be prioritised.
The FSB invites stakeholders to submit case studies on these issues by 20 October 2023. The feedback will be considered by the FSB as it develops its recommendations, which will be issued for public consultation in early 2024.