The Bankers Association for Finance and Trade (Baft) has officially launched its Global Payments Industry Council (GPIC) as part of its new payments strategy.

The GPIC was initially put together in July this year, and consists of 20 global heads of payments and cash management from member banks including ANZ, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan, MUFG, Nordea, Santander, Société Générale, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered, TD Bank, UBS, and Wells Fargo.

The council is chaired by David Kretz, head of GTS global strategy and payments for Bank of America, while Jean-François Mazure, head of cash clearing services for Société Générale, takes on the role of vice-chair. Samantha Pelosi, senior vice-president of payments and innovation at Baft, serves as the GPIC’s secretariat.

The GPIC’s primary purpose is to set Baft’s strategic agenda with respect to global payments and to ensure proper alignment of the association’s payments committees and working groups.

First on its to-do list will be interfacing with key regulators around the globe about the information linked to payments, since under the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) 2012 recommendations, the full name and address of both the originator and beneficiary of a payment needs to travel along with the funds through the entire payments chain.

“The messaging rules of Swift and market infrastructures are not structured ideally for the transfer of this information and market practices still vary,” Pelosi tells GTR. “With the advent of ISO20022, the industry has the opportunity to create a cohesive approach to the use of structured data, especially the city and country of the beneficiary.”

Also on the list is ensuring that the same standards around due diligence and risk are applied to all entities, whether banks or non-banks, wishing to participate in real-time payments systems.

Finally, the GPIC will be collating best practices for real-time payments participants, such as origination, on-boarding an entity to platform, expediting the resolution of exceptions in processing, and effectively leveraging the new technology.