Category: Text mining

Payments without borders: using ISO 20022 to identify cross-border payments in CHAPS

James Duffy and James Sanders

Understanding a payment’s journey around the globe can be difficult. As the operator of the UK’s high-value payment system (CHAPS), the Bank is all too familiar with this challenge. By leveraging the benefits of the newly introduced ISO 20022 standard for messaging, we have devised a new methodology to identify and classify cross-border CHAPS payments more effectively. This method reveals that international transactions form over half of CHAPS activity, and offers new insights into the global payment corridors for CHAPS payments. Gaining a deeper understanding of payment flows could assist policymakers in prioritising their efforts to reduce global barriers as they implement the G20 roadmap for enhancing cross-border payments.

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Open letters: Laying bare linguistic patterns in PRA messages using machine learning

David Bholat and James Brookes

In a recent research paper, we show that the way supervisors write to banks and building societies (hereafter ‘banks’) has changed since the financial crisis. Supervisors now adopt a more directive, forward-looking, complex and formal style than they did before the financial crisis. We also show that their language and linguistic style is related to the nature of the bank. For instance, banks that are closest to failure get letters that have a lot of risk-related language in them. In this blog, we discuss the linguistic features that most sharply distinguish different types of letters, and the machine learning algorithm we used to arrive at our conclusions.

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