Minutes of the Standards Advisory Panel – September 2022

Minutes

Date of meeting: 1 September 2022

Item 1: Welcome and introductions

The Chair welcomed members and provided an overview of the agenda for the meeting.

The Chair walked through actions from the last SAP meeting. Given the number of items on this SAP’s agenda and to allow for appropriate progress, the Chair proposed to move the SEF action to the next SAP. The remaining actions were meeting agenda items on the day.

The Chair thanked Margaret Walsh (Oracle) for her contributions as this is her last SAP meeting. Margaret proposed her colleague, Hein Wagenaar, to take over her position in SAP and the Enhanced Remittance Data workstream (A2). The Chair accepted this proposal given the desire to continue the work already in progress. The Chair welcomed Hein as an observer pending a formal review of Panel membership later in the year, according to the Terms of Reference. Hein then introduced himself to the Chair and members.

Item 2: Industry Readiness towards ISO 20022 implementations – for discussion

Following on from the last SAP, the Panel continued the discussion on industry readiness for the UK’s implementation of ISO 20022, focusing on the end-user impacts and varying levels of preparedness amongst specific groups.

The Bank of England (“Bank”) updated the panel on the implementation of ISO 20022 for CHAPS. The Bank successfully launched the Pilot Platform on 22 June, delaying launch by 2 days due to the technical problems in CREST and consequential Non Standard CREST Closure between 17 and 20 June. Over the circa two-month period prior to the start of formal Participant Acceptance Testing, around 12,000 ISO 20022 messages were exchanged between CHAPS Direct Participants. There were no material concerns from the results seen, with most Direct Participants exchanging ‘like-for-like’ messages (i.e. the minimum data required to submit successfully at go-live). Whilst volumes of enhanced data were low, this was unsurprising given that participants are taking a risk-based approach and choosing not to go straight to including enhanced data while they ‘shake down’ their ISO 20022 developments and results. Overall, community progress is in a good position and on track.

The Bank noted that it continued to monitor other market infrastructures’ ISO 20022 implementations and readiness, particularly those due to go live in November 2022. Were any major market infrastructure to need to delay, the Bank would have to carefully consider with the CHAPS community whether there would be any knock-on impact to community readiness for CHAPS go-live.

The Panel asked how “versioning” of the ISO 20022 message sets would be managed going forwards. The Bank noted that most global market infrastructures were not intending to move to a regular upgrade cycle until the demise of MT messages in November 2025. Exactly how the regular cycle would be work after November 2025 was a live topic of discussion between global market infrastructures and their participants; indeed it was likely to be a topic of discussion at SIBOS in October.

The Panel asked how the Bank is managing its resources delivering the RTGS renewal programme whilst also needing to resource commitments to other initiatives such as Pay.UK’s NPA programme. The Bank and Pay.UK replied to say that they have continuous engagement and mutual recognition of priorities between each other e.g. RTGS renewal lands prior to the NPA to avoid resource or capacity contention. Examples of working well together included joint work on the Common Credit Message (CCM), as well as recent work to agree the technical design of the RTGS settlement solution for the NPA.

A member of the Panel asked whether additional segment-specific use cases might be considered e.g. the insurance sector, to explore how their needs when using ISO 20022 would be met. This was supported by the Panel.

Action: to build a database with more use cases.

Item 3: Fraud industry initiative – for discussion

UK Finance (UKF) presented on the overall work being led by them on combatting fraud.

1. Data standardisation is a foundation for industry data sharing activities, including to combat fraud. However this important work also needed to be supported by other workstreams e.g. enabling legislation, obtaining industry buy-in across sectors and obtaining permissions to access to the right data. UKF also shared a future vision and landscape on fighting economic crime for the UK.
2. The Panel asked what was being done to increase consumer awareness and the steps being taken by industry to combat fraud. UKF referred to their “Take 5” campaign but given the evolution of fraud types, that continuous vigilance and awareness should be maintained. A Panel member cited new prevalent scams related to energy payments and asked if UK Finance were liaising with the UK Government; UKF confirmed that it was. A Panel member noted that it may be helpful to engage with the Cards industry, which itself has much experience and innovation when combatting fraud.
3. Pay.UK updated the Panel on the latest work on the development of the Enhanced Fraud Data standard (being developed by UKF and Pay.UK). Working closely with UKF, the logical data model was published by Pay.UK as a foundation for developing the new standard. An API-based Proof of Concept (PoC) is technically proving the relevant data exchanges between selected banks. The Chair asked what the tipping point is, beyond the PoC, to designing and implementing a full-scale solution. Pay.UK replied that the prototype was designed to focus on the simplest model possible – removing the constraints around Legal, Data Protection, etc. and just to prove that a technical solution could be built.

Action: The next steps beyond PoC will be brought back to the next SAP meeting.

The Panel asked whether the Enhanced Fraud Data solution would become an NPA Overlay Service. Pay.UK noted that this decision is still to be made, depending on the PoC outcomes and the solution design.

Item 4: Joint work between Pay.UK and the Bank of England in 2022 – update and discussion

Pay.UK updated SAP on the work of the two joint workstreams sanctioned by SAP: “A1: development of an API Framework for the UK payments industry” and “A2: the development of a standard for Structured Remittance Data” for specific use cases. The Panel noted that the initial meeting on workstream A1 was useful in setting out what we intended to do; but more clarity was required on workstream A2’s scope and objectives.

Action: The Chair asked that the workstream leads should provide clear scope and Terms of Reference to affirm the intent of each workstream at the next SAP meeting.

Item 5: Any other business

Pay.UK introduced Li Jie as their new Standards Business Partner Manager who will be working with the Bank both on coordinating and supporting SAP meetings and related initiatives, and the wider joint collaboration in standards setting between the two organisations.

Close of meeting.

Attendees

NB Hybrid meeting by MS Teams videoconference and on location in Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH

Members

Karen Braithwaite, Chair (Barclays)
James Barclay (JP Morgan)
Domenico Scaffidi (Volante)
James Whittle (Pay.UK)
James Southgate (Bank of England)
Jo Oxley (Government Banking Service)
Mike Walters (Form3)
Margaret Walsh (Oracle)
Caroline Stockman (ACT)

Observers

Ian Ellis (Payment Systems Regulator)
Hein Wagenaar (Oracle)

Other attendees

Bank of England & Pay.UK Secretariat
Bank of England & Pay.UK Presenters
Katy Worobec (UK Finance)

Apologies

Oli Bogaerts (FCA)
Toby Young (Ebury)
Ralf Ohlhausenv (PPRO)
Robert White (Santander)