Standards

Industry standards are necessary to achieve high levels of efficiency and operational certainty across the entire financial supply chain. Forming the foundation for thousands of payments made each day, standards are an essential component of banking operations.

Financial supply chains are often global and involve many participants from a range of different geographical locations. Therefore the development of industry standards can be challenging and at times quite complex.  Developing industry standards involves a lot of discussions between the organisations involved and it’s important that consensus on certain issues is reached and key business requirements are catered for.

Payments Council Standards

A standard is a document that enables users to develop their products in a way that helps to achieve efficiency.  Standards also mean different systems and products can be designed to work together.

Standards are developed by interested parties, e.g. users and manufacturers, and are agreed upon usually by consensus.  Conformance to standards is voluntary unless a national or regional directive states their use is compulsory or an industry agreement is reached.

Why do we have standards?

We have standards to ensure that business processes and functions are carried out in the most efficient, cost effective, unambiguous way, for all the parties involved.

In the finance industry, there are many business functions that need to be undertaken by a large number of organisations.  For example, a business or store that accepts a credit or debit card must route the transaction back to the card scheme so that they can be paid.  The scheme in turn must bill the customer so that the card scheme can be reimbursed.

How do I obtain a standard?

Interested organisations can click here to download the instructions on how to obtain a standard.

All standards are created in .pdf format.  To read the standards you will need an Acrobat Reader which you can download free from here.

To keep abreast of changes to the published standards there is an annual renewal charge of 50% of the original cost.

For further information about the publicly available standards please e-mail the standards administrator Kathy.ryan@ukpayments.org.uk