The Bank of England published its FMI annual report, which sets out how the central bank has exercised its responsibilities in respect of supervising financial market infrastructure over the past year. The safe operation of FMIs is a key plank for maintaining financial stability in the United Kingdom as well as in other countries, and the BoE is committed to ensuring UK FMIs are operating safely and to working cooperatively with regulators globally.
Over the past year, the Bank’s supervision of financial market infrastructures has played an important part in delivering overall financial stability objective. Alongside its regular supervisory work, it has in 2017 had a particular focus on the operational resilience of FMIs.
FMIs need to operate smoothly every day, so their availability and resilience is one of the key objectives of the BoE’s supervisors. Supervisory reviews have also focussed on the firms that provide critical services to FMIs, those that FMIs outsource to more generally, and on business continuity plans.
There have also been important changes to the population of FMIs supervised. This includes the Bank of England which now has responsibility for operating the UK’s high-value payment system, CHAPS. And change in retail payment systems has also continued with the creation of the new payment system operator in July which, in 2018, is scheduled to take on responsibility for operating two of the payments systems the Bank supervises, Bacs and the Faster Payments Service.