Financial market infrastructures, many of which are
natural monopolies, are typically of critical
systemic importance and thus subject to intrusive regulation and monitoring.
At the global level, the applicable standards are the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI), first issued in April 2012 jointly by the Committee on Payments and Settlement Systems (CPSS, renamed in 2014 as
Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures - CPMI) and the
International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).
[8] These brought together standards that had previously been issued separately for systemically important payment systems (CPSS, January 2001), securities settlement systems (CPSS & IOSCO, November 2001), and central counterparties (CPSS & IOSCO, November 2004).
[9]: 306 The related semantics sometimes distinguishes between supervision, typically by
prudential authorities and
securities commissions, and oversight by
central banks, even though in practice that distinction has eroded over the years.
[9]: 316 For example, international cooperative oversight frameworks exist for SWIFT (led by the
National Bank of Belgium) and CLS (led by the
U.S. Federal Reserve). The Eurosystem oversight framework, led by the
European Central Bank, associates
National Central Banks to the oversight of
TARGET Services,
EURO1 and
STEP2-T.
[9]: 321