AES Migration Program Updates

18 August 2023

In December 2022, work commenced on developing a Program Initiation Document (PID) for the AES Migration Program, detailing the background, rationale, approach, and plan for migrating to AES for the national card payments system. A consultative approach was taken to developing the PID, allowing Members to review, endorse, and validate content for the PID through several working groups, representing Members from the Issuers and Acquirers Community (IAC).

Since December 2022, four iterations of working group meetings have been held, resulting in the final draft of the PID being endorsed in May 2023.

The plan to migrate to AES has two phases:

• Initiation and Mobilisation (July 2023 – December 2024): This phase includes preparatory activities to finalise outstanding issues – including the technical blueprint, testing strategy, migration approach, legal, risk and compliance assessment – to provide time for participants to formalise their business cases, secure funding, and mobilise teams. It is anticipated that participants will be ready to commence their programs by January 2025.
   
• Execution (January 2025 – December 2030): This phase includes industry readiness activities leading to an industry pilot, with migration to follow. An extended period of coexistence has been planned for the migration. This enables assets to be upgraded in line with their natural replacement cycles, as far as is possible, thus reducing marginal effort and cost. Execution will complete once all assets have been upgraded and TDES (Triple Data Encryption Standard) has been removed.

In July, work commenced on the first six months of the Initiation and Mobilisation phase, focused on the technical blueprint and options to approach the migration.