Payments and the ability to exchange value efficiently and securely over the web are critical to global commerce. Open standards for payments and value exchange help ensure open access and interoperability to financial systems for all the people that use the Web. This document describes aset of capabilities that, if standardized, will improve payments on the Web.

This document is in early draft state and is expected to rapidly evolve based on broad feedback and input from the Web Payments Interest Group.

In addition to this document, the Web Payments Interest Group is developing:

Overview of Capabilities

Capabilities are functionalities necessary to implement payments on the Web. We include capabilities specific to payments but also capabilities that support payments (such as security) and capabilities more broadly related to commerce, as it is important to understand the full context in which payments occur.

We organize capabilities into five groups.

Security Core - These capabilities provide the security foundation for payments. Capabilities: Key Creation and Management, Cryptographic Signatures, Encryption Right now this group has only security capabilities in it. We may wish to have a more general purpose Core set. If so, what would this core set include? Trust and Identity - Includes features related to establishing trust among parties, and credentialing or authorization of parties involved in a transaction. Capabilities: Identity, Credentials, Rights, Authentication, Authorization, Privacy, Discovery, Registration, Enrollment, and Legal/Regulatory concerns. Accounts and Settlement - Includes capabilities related to managing stores of value (such as Deposit Accounts) and recorded accounts of ownership (such as Ledger entries, Deeds, etc.) used as part of the settlement of payments or commercial exchanges. Settlement via the Web involves access to the accounts of the participants and ledgers of the account providers and capabilities to manage accounts and capture and monitor transactions in a ledger against those accounts.

Capabilities: Accounts, Ledgers, and Legal/Regulatory concerns related to accounting and recorded ownership. Payments and Clearing - These are the capabilities that help parties in a transaction establish the mechanics of how the payment will be executed and the directly or indirectly make this happen. This involves the ability to discover and negotiate the mechanism that will be used to execute the payment and agree on the terms including facts such as the costs of making the payment, time between clearing of the payment and settlement into the payee’s account, regulatory requirements and required authorisations. Capabilities: Funding, Payment, Messaging, Clearing, Markets, Foreign/Currency Exchange, and Legal/regulatory concerns specific to Payments and Exchange of Value. Commerce - Includes capabilities related to commercial and economic interactions. Capabilities: Offers, Invoicing, Receipts, Loyalty, Rewards, Contracts, Lending, Insurance, Taxation, Legal/Regulatory concerns related to aspects of commercial and economic interactions.

The Interest Group anticipates that these groups will make it easier to define modules that may be reused at a variety of times in a payment transaction, to prioritize capabilities and craft charters for groups to standardize them, and to communicate the group’s plans with other standards bodies and organizations.

Some of these capabilities are expected be useful outside of payment scenarios.