Payment Systems and Banking Operations

Mobile wallets replicate physical wallets on a mobile device, in which users can store different payment instruments (e.g., cards, transfers) to make mobile payments. As the mobile wallet is adopted, a mobile payment scheme emerges, with its users as elements in a network of…

Remember this! During the first semester of 2021, as part of modernization and digital transformation undertaken by the Foreign Exchange Affairs and Settlements Department, changes will be made in the procedures to record international investments, among others related to the Foreign Exchange…

Under the market discipline hypothesis, monitoring by interbank lenders may induce changes in either the price or availability of new interbank funds to borrower banks. However, the presence of interbank relationship lending has been evaluated based on the availability of funds…

Although Colombia has made significant progress in the access to transactional products offered by the financial system, their use by the public is still low, and merchants and consumers continue to use cash intensively. One of the reasons why Colombians prefer cash to…

This report concludes my mission in the Banco de la República de Colombia (BR). This mission took place in Bogotá on December 9-13, 2019.  It had three main objectives:

Cross-holding of securities in financial systems occurs when i) two financial institutions hold securities issued by each other or ii) more than two financial institutions hold securities issued by each other in a circular structure. Securities cross-holding is relevant for…

We present a general supervised machine learning methodology to represent the payment behavior of financial institutions starting from a database of transactions in the Colombian large-value payment system.

With the Payment Systems Report, every year, the Central Bank of Colombia provides a thorough overview of the local financial market infrastructure.

During the first semester of 2021, as part of modernization and digital transformation undertaken by the Foreign Exchange Affairs and Settlements Department, there will be changes in the procedures to record international investments. So, there might be some adjustments to the procedures…

Stable and strong lending relations among financial institutions have been credited as the mainstay of interbank markets and financial stability. They are an indicator of trust among financial institutions. From a network perspective, we measure how stable relations are in the…

In this article, we study the role of cash and electronic payments in the payment ecosystems of Colombia and the world, and the factors that determine their demand.

For these purposes, we address the following research questions:

A central counterparty (CCP) interposes itself between buyers and sellers of financial contracts to extinguish their bilateral exposures and –thus- to reduce counterparty risk. Therefore, this interposition should affect the way market participants engage in…

Anomaly detection methods aim at identifying observations that deviate manifestly from what is expected. Such methods are usually run on low dimensional data, such as time series. However, the increasing importance of high dimensional payments and exposures data for…

Today (Nov

Although transactions of foreign exchange market intermediaries with the real sector in the peso-dollar market are low in comparison to the ones with offshore agents, it is important to understand the behavior of the real sector and its impact on the exchange market. This paper assesses…

Even though the levels and growth rates of adoption of digital payments have reached significant figures in the recent past, the demand for cash continues to grow in both developed and developing economies across the world. This puzzle has found only partial explanations in…

In this seventh edition of the Payment Systems Report, the boxes focus on three topics of interest to the industry that renders payments clearing and settlement services as well as to those taking part in them. First, the international debate revolving around the optimal capital level of Central…

On 3 November 1998, Banco de la República (the Central Bank of Colombia) launched the Electronic Trading System (SEN). The SEN is a technology infrastructure managed by the Central Bank for the negotiation and registration of transactions with public debt bonds holdings at the Central Security…