Advancing the Federal Reserve’s wholesale services in an era of unprecedented challenge and change

Abstract

The Federal Reserve’s wholesale services provide a substantial base of the US financial market infrastructure, yielding an immense transactional value of payments and securities transfers across the Fedwire Funds Service, the Fedwire Securities Service and the National Settlement Service. The systemically important nature of these services, as well as their interconnectedness and dependencies with other financial market infrastructures, results in a keen focus and priority on resiliency and application security. Several elements of resiliency that have garnered much attention in recent years include greater technological diversity in third-level resiliency and security schemes, development of manual contingency procedures in the event of a protracted wholesale service disruption and enhancements in end-to-end security. The collective industry focus on resiliency and security of critical infrastructure represents a momentous challenge. With those goals paramount to its efforts, the Wholesale Product Office is also undertaking a series of initiatives to enhance the value proposition of its service suite.