Adequately planning for possible improvements in a country's payment system first involves stock-taking - knowing where you are to begin with - and forecasting likely payment system growth - knowing where you might be in the future. A summary list of quantitative information useful for this task is shown in .Table A1. Stock-taking concerns the development of benchmark information regarding a country's infrastructure (communication/transportation, legal, and informational) its financial system (banking system structure, distribution, and technology), its existing payment system (instruments used, types of processing, and clearing arrangements), and its incentive structure and user needs. If data do not already exist, surveys can be developed to collect sample data on these elements. All of these elements have been touched on or discussed in the text and thus represents a useful summary of payment issues raised in this paper.

Although not explicitly listed in the table, the data collected should include estimates of current volumes and values of payment flows by major types of payment instruments, focusing on flows both within and among a country's major trading centers. With this data, projections of likely payment growth can be approximated by tieing payment growth - by type of payment - to the expected growth in production and trade. Information on current and projected payment volumes is crucial in order to properly design the major components of all types of payment systems, including large-value networks, clearing houses for small-value payments, and the interbank and bank-central bank communications infrastructure that ties them together.