Secure Payments Task Force

From 2015 through 2018, the Federal Reserve System’s Secure Payments Task Force engaged a diverse array of more than 200 stakeholders in advancing the work outlined in the January 2015 Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System (PDF). The mission of the Secure Payments Task Force was to provide a forum for stakeholders to advise the Federal Reserve in its leader/catalyst and operator roles on payment security matters, and identify and promote actions that can be taken by payment system participants collectively or by the Federal Reserve System. The task force anchored their work around three objectives and made significant progress in meeting them during its operation from June 2015 through March 2018.

The Progress to Secure Payments

With facilitation support from the Fed, the task force took an active role in building consensus and developing work products through face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, segment calls, webinars, surveys and other tools designed to solicit and calibrate participant viewpoints.

In November 2017, the task force developed and published a list of currently available fraud and risk Information Sharing Data Sources (Off-site) that may be used to mitigate fraud and cyber threats, in an effort to broaden the use of actionable information across payment system participants. Then in March 2018, the task force concluded its efforts and published the Payment Lifecycles and Security Profiles (Off-site), which serve as an educational reference guide for payment and security practitioners on the lifecycles of the most common payment types.

Work Groups

The task force created targeted work groups that discussed industry challenges and proposed solutions for effecting lasting payments security improvements. The focus of each work group and contributions to the aforementioned security resources are noted below.

• The Data Protection Work Group and Payment Identity Management Work Group began focusing on their respective disciplines separately – but quickly realized that to advance security in these areas, they must work together to understand the landscape and talk about the payment lifecycle holistically. The groups collaborated to create an educational resource that describes the lifecycle for the most common payment types. This resource highlights not only how a given payment type works, but also security methods, sensitive data and associated risks throughout three key phases of the lifecycle: enrollment, transaction and reconciliation. This resource, the Payment Lifecycles and Security Profiles (Off-site), is available on SecurePaymentsTaskForce.org (Off-site).
• The Law and Regulation Coordination Work Group and the Standards Assessment Team also provided significant input on the Payment Lifecycles and Security Profiles (Off-site), including subject matter expertise on applicable laws, regulations, standards and other references.
• The Information Sharing Work Group focused on improving awareness of inclusive cybersecurity and fraud information sharing among and across U.S. payment industry participants. To advance this goal, this work group created Information Sharing Data Sources (Off-site) that can help organizations address payments fraud risk. The work group also highlighted the need for a recommended fraud classification model to use in discussing and reporting fraud, now being developed by the Fed’s Fraud Definitions Work Group.

View the work product voting reports and records below:

• Payment Lifecycles and Security Profiles Vote Report (PDF)
• Payment Lifecycles and Security Profiles Vote Record (PDF)
• Information Sharing Data Sources Vote Report (PDF)
• Information Sharing Data Sources Vote Record (PDF)
• Decision-Making Framework Vote Report (PDF)
• Decision-Making Framework Vote Record (PDF)

Secure Payments Task Force Participants

The progress made in payments security could not have been possible without more than 200 task force participants who dedicated their expertise, diverse perspectives, time and energy to the Secure Payments Task Force. Thank you to all who served on the task force and helped identify actions that can be taken by industry stakeholders to ensure that U.S. payment system security remains strong – and that protections and incident responses keep pace with rapidly evolving and expanding security threats.

Check out the task force participant roster (Off-site) for a comprehensive list of all participants at the conclusion of the task force. Eight unique stakeholder segments were represented. Each segment elected representatives to serve on the Secure Payments Task Force Steering Committee (identified by an * and bold text).