The Reserve Bank is considering a major change to the governance of the payments industry as a way of ensuring the sector is better able to undertake systemic innovation.The RBA's Payment System Board has identified a number of gaps in the payment system that require co-operation between industry participants if they are to be addressed. These include transmission of data with electronic payments, use of international standards, timeliness of payments and the addressing of electronic payments.The RBA's assistant governor Malcolm Edey, said the co-operative innovation required for such developments can be hard to achieve because of differing commercial interests and the timing of company investment cyclesSpeaking at Terrapinn's Card & Payments conference in Sydney yesterday, Edey said: "The challenge is to find a way of determining when innovations of that nature are in the public interest and, if so, to ensure they go ahead. "Industry-level decision making may be only part of the answer."Edey gave a rundown on the RBA's regulatory agenda. He confirmed that the PSB was in the final stages of consultation on a new merchant surcharging standard. Features of the new standard will include limiting surcharging to the cost of card acceptance, a prohibition on "blended" surcharges (a single charge, regardless of the card used for payment) and the granting of power to scheme operators to take action if they detect excessive surcharging.Other issues the PSB is working on include the regulatory framework of the Eftpos system and the resilience of the retail payments system.Edey said: "As a consequence of the establishment of EPAL, the Eftpos system now works largely as a multilateral network. But much of the existing framework was designed in reference to the earlier bilaterally based system. The relevance and applicability of the existing framework will need to be looked at."On the issue of resilience, he said: "For some time the Reserve Bank has been monitoring significant retail payment outages and following up with the relevant banks to diagnosis and take appropriate remedial actions."What we are now proposing is to formalise that role in two ways. We will be putting in place a more systematic reporting regime for retail outages. And we have begun a consultation process with the banks as to whether further measures are needed to improve operational resilience across the system."