A Study on the Interdependencies of Payment and Settlement Systems in Korea

Abstract

With the payment and settlement systems becoming more and more complex and interconnected, the issue of their interdependency rises as an important academic issue as well as a policy topic. This study examines causes, forms, and risk management of interdependencies of payment and settlement systems in Korea, and presents their current situation. By way of simulations using BOF-PSS2 developed by the Bank of Finland, we quantify the effects of an operational disruption on the payment and settlement systems so as to figure out the degree of interdependency. As a result, the secondary round effect reaches up to ￦13.6 trillion a day, which amounts to 7.8% of the daily settlement value. Furthermore, if we also consider the amount of direct operational disruption, the volume of operational disruption occupies 22.3% of total value of the daily settlement, evidencing that the interdependencies of the payment and settlement systems in Korea is enormously widespread. The secondary round effects are found to be more severe with security companies rather than with banks, and to be more depended upon when it is perceived rather than it actually happens. In case that we expand the liquidity to include cash holdings and deposits as assets, the secondary round effect dramatically decreases in all types of financial institutions while foreign banks account for more share of all the secondary round effects increases. Based on these results, we suggest various policy tasks and directions to improve the risk management of settlement systems: expansion of off-setting settlements, introduction of a new settlement system for securities transactions, rapid provision of liquidity to financial institutions, more effective monitoring on participant institutions, and intensified information sharing and cooperation among the systems.