Private Sector

Payments Research Survey
Collection Information
(FR 3067; OMB No. 7100-0355)
Summary
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Board), under delegated
authority from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), proposes to extend for three years,
with minor revision, the Payments Research Survey (FR 3067; OMB No. 7100-0355). This
survey collects information, as needed, on specific and time sensitive issues, which may affect
the Federal Reserve’s decision making. Respondents may comprise depository institutions,
financial and nonfinancial businesses and related entities, individual consumers, households, or
federal, state, and local government agencies. This survey may be mandatory for a certain subset
of entities and voluntary for all other respondents. The Board uses this event-driven survey to
obtain information specifically tailored to the Federal Reserve System’s supervisory, regulatory,
fiscal, and operational responsibilities. The Board may conduct various versions of the survey,
as needed, and may survey respondents up to two times per year. The frequency and content of
the questions depends on changing economic, regulatory, supervisory, or legislative
developments.
Description of Information Collection
The Board may conduct various versions of the Payments Research Survey during the
year, and as needed, survey respondents up to four times a year, to collect information on
specific issues that affect its decision making. The principal value of the FR 3067 is the
flexibility it provides the Federal Reserve to respond quickly to the need for data due to
unanticipated economic, financial, or regulatory developments and unforeseen requests for
information from Congress or others. The Board cannot predict what specific information would
be needed but, because such needs are often time sensitive, staff request approval to continue to
conduct the Payments Research Survey as needed.
The survey topics are time sensitive and the questions of interest vary with the focus of
the survey. Because the relevant questions may change with each survey, there is no fixed
reporting form. For each survey, the Board, in consultation with any partners, prepares questions
of specific topical interest and then determines the relevant target group to contact.
Although the exact topics to be covered by the FR 3067 are not known at this time, the
Board believes that potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
 general payments research,
 wholesale payments research,
 research related to clearing and settling transactions,
 retail payments research,
 payment card networks research, and
 currency and coin research.
The FR 3067 could take the form of interviewer-mediated, face-to-face, or telephone

interviews; self-administered interviews using paper questionnaires, the telephone, or the
Internet; focus group discussions; cognitive interviews; or other formal or less formal formats.
The size of the samples and the length of the data collection period would vary depending on the
particular informational needs.
Written qualitative questions or questionnaires may include categorical questions, yes-no
questions, ordinal questions, and open-ended questions. Written quantitative surveys may
include dollar amounts, percentages, numbers of items, interest rates, and other such information.
These data will only be collected if the request is time-sensitive or adequate data of this sort is
not available from any other source. These quantitative surveys enable the Board to collect a
limited amount of data from a defined set of depository institutions; financial and nonfinancial
businesses and related entities; individual consumers; and households in the event of an
immediate and critical need for specific information. These data are not collected on any other
reporting form or on the same frequency as other substantively similar data. Less formal
information collection studies, such as focus groups or cognitive interviews, may use a set of
structured qualitative and quantitative questions as a guide in a more extended discussion of the
questions and answers.
In its assessment of the need to perform a survey under FR 3067, the Board determines if
the information to be collected is available by other means or sources within the Federal Reserve
System.
The survey may be coordinated and conducted by the Board with assistance from
Reserve Bank staff as part of other ongoing research or regulatory activities or through a private
firm, which would be chosen in a competitive bidding process.1 The research instruments could
be developed by the Federal Reserve System alone or jointly with a firm selected by the Federal
Reserve System. As necessary, the firm would be responsible for testing the survey procedures,
following the sampling protocol established by the Federal Reserve System alone or jointly with
the firm, conducting the survey as specified by the Federal Reserve System, preparing data files
containing the responses, computing analysis weights, and documenting all survey procedures.
Data editing and analysis of the results would be conducted either solely by the Federal Reserve
System or jointly with the selected firm. In determining how to conduct a particular survey, the
Federal Reserve System considers the resources required. In some cases, Reserve Bank staff
may assist the Board to conduct the surveys, leveraging their relationships and contacts with
institutions and current work assignments.

1

Board staff believe it would generally ask for assistance from Reserve Bank staff with expertise in data collection
applications and processes, or with knowledge of the topic to be researched.

2