If FATF governs who you let in, the CPMI governs whether the pipes hold. The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures sets the principles for the systems that clear and settle the world's money — and leads the G20 push to fix cross-border payments.
The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) is a standard-setting body hosted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the "central bank for central banks" in Basel. The CPMI brings together central banks to set standards for, and promote the safety and efficiency of, financial market infrastructures (FMIs): payment systems, central securities depositories, securities settlement systems, central counterparties and trade repositories.
Where FATF is about who moves money and whether it is clean, the CPMI is about whether the systems themselves are sound — resilient, well-governed, and unlikely to transmit a shock through the financial system. It is one half of the global picture every payments professional should hold: integrity (FATF) and infrastructure (CPMI).
The global standard for systemically important FMIs — payment systems, CSDs, SSSs, CCPs and trade repositories.
Among the principles, clear and robust settlement finality is foundational — it is what makes a payment irrevocable and the system trustworthy.
Governance, credit/liquidity risk, default management and operational resilience — the disciplines that stop one failure becoming systemic.
Central banks and regulators assess and supervise FMIs against the PFMI — it shapes oversight, not just guidance.
The CPMI's flagship standard is the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI), issued jointly with IOSCO (the international securities-regulators body) in 2012. The PFMI is a set of principles — covering governance, credit and liquidity risk, settlement finality, default management, operational risk and more — that systemically important FMIs are expected to observe, and that national regulators use to assess and supervise them.
The PFMI is why a major RTGS, CSD or central counterparty in one country broadly behaves like its peers elsewhere: same risk disciplines, same settlement-finality expectations, same operational-resilience bar. For payments specifically, it is the reason high-value settlement systems are held to a deliberately high standard — a failure there is systemic, not local.
The end-2027 G20 targets are real but ambitious; progress across the 19 building blocks varies a lot. Don't treat the roadmap as a delivered outcome.
Like FATF, the CPMI has no direct legal force — its influence runs through central banks and regulators adopting its principles.
Since the G20 endorsed the Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments in 2020, the CPMI has led the technical work — it owns the lead on a majority of the roadmap's building blocks. The roadmap's goal is blunt: make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent and more inclusive, with quantitative targets set for end-2027.
The themes the CPMI prioritises are payment-system interoperability and access; legal, regulatory and supervisory consistency; and cross-border data and message standards — which is exactly where the ISO 20022 harmonisation work lives. This is the connective tissue: the CPMI's data-harmonisation publications are why the ISO 20022 migration and the cross-border roadmap are the same story told at different layers.
If you operate or connect to a payment system, CSD or CCP, the PFMI is the bar your infrastructure is held to — and increasingly the bar your regulator expects you to evidence. Settlement finality, operational resilience and default management are not abstractions; they are the questions you will be asked in oversight. Reading the PFMI tells you what "good" looks like before a supervisor defines it for you.
If you build or sell cross-border products, the G20 roadmap is the policy weather system you operate inside. The push toward interoperability, ISO 20022 harmonisation and faster settlement is the reason instant rails are interlinking, the reason data standards are converging, and the reason the cost-and-speed bar keeps rising. Aligning your roadmap to the CPMI's direction is cheaper than being caught flat by it.
The honest framing: the CPMI is upstream and slow-moving, but it is where the long-term shape of payments infrastructure is decided. You will rarely interact with it directly — but its principles and its roadmap explain why your regulators, your rails and your standards are all moving the way they are. It is the layer that makes the rest legible.