Reserve Bank of Australia Payments System Board presses ASX on CHESS remediation and prepares consultations on FMI crisis resolution and card surcharging

The Reserve Bank of Australia’s Payments System Board published an update from its June 2025 meeting that focused on resilience and regulatory reform across market and payments infrastructure. Reviewing ASX’s response to the Reserve Bank’s out-of-cycle assessment of ASX Clear and ASX Settlement following the December 2024 CHESS batch failure, the Board noted that ASX’s initial response did not address key issues and provided insufficient remediation detail; after further steps to obtain information, the Reserve Bank has now received additional details and staff were asked to continue exploring regulatory options on resourcing for the current CHESS system and to ensure the CHESS Replacement is built with appropriate resilience. On financial market infrastructure reforms, the Board welcomed progress in operationalising powers to prevent or resolve a crisis at an Australian clearing and settlement facility and endorsed a public consultation on guidance setting expectations for when and how those crisis resolution powers would generally be exercised, with consultation expected to commence shortly. For merchant card payments, a consultation paper is expected in July seeking feedback on preliminary conclusions from the review of card payment costs and surcharging and on draft revisions to the Reserve Bank’s standards. The Board welcomed AusPayNet’s Standard for Payment Service Provider Porting of Merchant Payment-Related Data and expects industry participants to comply by 1 July 2026, aligning with the Reserve Bank’s expectations on tokenisation of payment cards and storage of primary account numbers. An update on work to address recommendations from the March 2024 assessment of the Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System covered change management, cyber resilience and internal control and operating model changes, but indicated improvements are unlikely to be fully effective by the next assessment scheduled for March 2026. Minor amendments were also approved to the ATM Access Regime to reflect changes to administration of the ATM Access Code, alongside a change to the Reserve Bank’s conflicts of interest policy to allow relevant staff to jointly observe or participate in broadly representative industry committees and working groups.