Bank of England requirements for governance, operational resilience and outsourcing at recognised payment-system operators and specified service providers.

The code turns the Bank of England’s supervisory framework into requirements for the operators and service providers in its scope. Governance, operational resilience and outsourcing are considered together because the reliability of a payment system depends on both its internal organisation and external dependencies.

Operational resilience focuses on the continued delivery of important services through disruption. Technology availability is one input, alongside people, processes, data, facilities and third parties. Mapping those dependencies exposes situations in which an apparently healthy component still cannot deliver the end-to-end service that customers or other institutions rely on.

Risk management seeks to prevent failures; continuity and recovery planning deal with failures that still occur. Scenario testing examines whether those arrangements work under severe but plausible conditions, including the loss of an important supplier or a shared dependency. Recovery objectives, communication and decision-making responsibilities need to be connected to the affected service rather than considered only as technical system settings.

For payment activity, disruption can affect initiation, authentication, processing, settlement support and access to funds in different ways. Evidence from incidents and tests helps identify weaknesses and track remediation. The instrument's scope determines which institutions or infrastructures are covered and how its governance, reporting and assurance expectations interact with other financial-sector rules.