Page 30 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Recommendations

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Recommendations

Title of recommendation Business aspects of interoperability
Working Group Interoperability

Audience for recommendation DFS providers

The implementation of interoperability arrangements should leverage the experience in establishing interopera-
bility from other countries and/or other sectors. If available, international best practices and technical standards
should be used. Shared infrastructures, within and across countries, should be considered for the processing of
interoperable transactions.

Many markets are looking at varied ways of implementing interoperability arrangements and this presents
the risk that all the domestic deployments operate on different principles and standards creating domestic
anomalies for providers and making cross border transactions challenging. Interoperability can mean
different things in different markets, but certain elements need to be addressed by all interoperability schemes/
operating rules.

Interoperability agreements should cover a broad range of aspects of how participants agree to work with
each other and cover aspects such as business models, settlement models, dispute rules, risk, governance
and more. Promoting the use of existing rules as example may not only avoid duplication in effort and potential
unnecessary domestic anomalies, but will also support regional and global harmonization enabling standardized
and efficient future cross border transactions.

Infrastructure-level interoperability, whereby the same infrastructure can be used to support multiple
payment mechanisms, is especially relevant for innovative payment products, since without some basic
interoperability with more traditional payment instruments and systems their acceptance and/or usefulness
for consumers might be very limited. In the absence of interoperability among payment infrastructures, a
sizeable cross-membership combined with system-wide interoperability would enable achievement of de-
facto cross-system interoperability.

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