Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) is a committee of central banks hosted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel. It was created in its current form in September 2014, when the BIS renamed and broadened the mandate of the former Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems (CPSS), which itself had operated since 1990. The CPMI reports to the Global Economy Meeting of BIS central bank governors.

Its core function is to set international standards for payment systems, central counterparties (CCPs), central securities depositories, securities settlement systems, and trade repositories. The most influential CPMI output is the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI), issued jointly with IOSCO in April 2012, which now serves as the baseline framework that national regulators use to supervise systemically important financial market infrastructures.

CPMI work also covers:

• Cross-border payments, where it leads the technical workstreams of the G20 Roadmap endorsed in October 2020 to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive.
• Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), including the 2020 joint report with seven central banks and the BIS on foundational principles.
• Cyber resilience of FMIs, addressed in guidance issued jointly with IOSCO in June 2016.
• Statistics on payments and FMIs, published annually in the Red Book.

Membership consists of central banks; as of the mid-2010s expansion it includes roughly two dozen jurisdictions spanning major advanced and emerging economies. The CPMI has no treaty-based legal authority — its standards are soft law — but its principles are typically incorporated into national law and into IMF/World Bank Financial Sector Assessment Programs (FSAPs), giving them strong de facto force.

For MUN and IR researchers, CPMI is the key venue for understanding how the plumbing of global finance is governed outside formal intergovernmental organizations.