The purpose of this industry forum is to provide an environment for the groups associated with the USDA’s issuance, processing and redemption of SNAP benefits to discuss issues related to the upgrading of the SNAP EBT card to a chip card, as well as the associated updates around mobile NFC payments and SNAP Electronic Healthy Food Incentive Program (eHIP). These groups include the USDA, State Agencies, Retailers, Card Processors, and others. The group is to work through issues related to upgrading the SNAP EBT card and make recommendations to the X9A11 work group which is responsible for the ASC X9.58 standard that controls the SNAP card. The group will provide an open forum to discuss and reach consensus on these issues.  

This group will initially investigate the current AI product offerings and learn as much as possible about each. Special attention should be given to products that could be used by the financial industry. The group will then create educational information for X9 members tailored to people with only a marginal background in AI. 

The purpose of the Legal Orders Exchange is to provide an open roundtable industry forum to the Court Orders and Levies industry to enable discussion on the following:

ASC X9.129 Legal Orders Exchange Standard – background and benefits of the electronic levy exchange standard and its interoperability.
Industry adoption – benefits and challenges; enable discussion that will assist with adoption across industry discussion supporting these other standards under development: X9.144 Production Subpoenas and X9.147 Audit Confirmation & Account Verification Exchange.

This public forum will address issues related to disparate financial data terms, in order to effect greater financial market efficiency. The X9 Industry Forum on Financial Terms Harmonization will review and harmonize current industry-wide differences in financial data terms, meanings and definitions, with the eventual goal of creating a Data Dictionary/Data Glossary that is used by all.

The new forum will foster an open dialogue where participants share their organization’s or sector’s standard terms and definitions, and forum members will collaborate to agree on a harmonized definition for each instrument or data element. The expected outcome is a common Data Dictionary/Data Glossary that will be employed across all sectors of the financial services industry, eliminating proprietary terms and definitions that can increase the risk, and potential failure, of a financial transaction. All are welcome to participate.

The U.S. ISO 20022 Market Practice Industry Forum will identify and address important topics for market coordination in order to promote consistent industry approaches for ISO 20022 implementations, and to lower the barriers to adoption. Toward those ends, the group proposes to bring together a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including corporations and other industry organizations. These representative participants will collaborate to define use cases from a practitioner point of view and to understand best practices across payment types, based on consensus across industries.

This study group is reviewing real-time and faster payments activity in the financial industry, with the intent to become X9’s central point of contact for all related and supporting X9 technical standards and to coordinate related work within X9. Those with interest in real-time payments are invited to join. 

The Cryptographic Algorithm Sunrise/Sunset Study Group has been formed to document cryptographic algorithm sunrise and sunset dates.

This is needed to address industry changes in what is deemed acceptable for adequate protection of sensitive data. As each subcommittee talks about how to move the industry standards forward and away from older inadequate protocols, it was determined the best approach was to scope, select and document sunrise and sunset dates for cryptographic algorithms used in X9 standards.

The focus of this study group is to examine the reliance concerns and processing issues related to “Certificate Authority” third party service providers and the possibility of operating a centralized Certificate Authority specifically devoted to the financial services industry. This would be a Certificate Authority on which trust for current and future financial industry security could rely upon as a fully interoperable point of service that would exist above any question of security, user authentication, or commercial interest. It would also be independent of rules and requirements from other industry groups which have much different needs than the financial community.

ASC X9  has established the X9F study group (SG) on Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to determine strategy and tactics for the financial services industry. X9 has a 25-year history in developing and maintaining ANSI and ISO asymmetric cryptography and PKI-related standards. However, migration to the TLS v1.3 protocol affects the financial services industry. X9 has established this study group to research issues as discovered by the recommended research and present strategic and tactical solutions that might include new standardization or possibly other X9 actions. 

In the past, a technology that broke an existing cryptographic method was used primarily on real-time or near real-time data. Today, the Internet has a massive storage capacity that allows many years of data to be stored. This means that in 5 to 10 years, new technology could be applied to the stored data allowing it to be decrypted. This raises a question, is it too late to protect data already stored or being stored today from future attacks? 

There are research centers around the world working to create a large scale, fault tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer that would be cryptographically relevant (able to break some of today’s cryptographic algorithms in a short period of time).  For many years, the question was – “could such a computer ever be created?”  Today, there is some agreement that such a quantum computer can be created although major work is still required. The new question is – “when?” The answer to that question will have a major impact on data communications and specifically on how the financial services industry stores and transmits information.

The Quantum Computing Risk study group was created to review the state of quantum computing and to try to determine a time period for when it is most likely that a large-scale quantum computer will exist and, based on this prediction, propose a high-level roadmap for protecting information used by the financial services industry.