Payments firms welcome Bank of England infrastructure consultation

The Bank of England has opened a consultation on the design of the United Kingdom’s next-generation retail payments infrastructure. The payments specialists who responded welcomed the move. Several also warned that its value will be judged on what gets built, not on the strategy behind it.

The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board, a senior industry body chaired by the Bank of England, launched the consultation on 25 June. It covers the core clearing and messaging infrastructure that sits beneath retail payments, rather than the consumer products and services that firms will continue to build on top. The work forms part of the National Payments Vision, the framework the Treasury set out in November 2024, and delivery is overseen by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee, chaired by HM Treasury alongside the Bank, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator. The consultation runs until 11 September.

The timetable carries some weight because the UK has tried to overhaul its payments rails before. The New Payments Architecture, a large-scale programme run by Pay.UK, ran for the best part of a decade and was scaled back before the government concluded, in the National Payments Vision, that a “more agile and flexible” approach was needed. That history sits underneath the responses to this consultation, several of which return to the same worry: that strategy will once again outpace delivery.

Andrew Ducker, senior payments consultant at Icon Solutions, put that concern most directly. “The industry does not need another prolonged cycle of discussion without meaningful implementation,” he said, welcoming the consultation as “an important opportunity to move the conversation from strategy to implementation”. He set out the task in two parts: nearer-term improvements to existing rails such as Bacs and Faster Payments within three years, and a next-generation infrastructure over the following seven to ten. The board’s priority after the consultation, he said, “must then be to establish a clear, credible and actionable roadmap that gives the industry the confidence to invest and move forward”.

For Mike Walters, co-founder and chief executive of Form3, the point of the exercise is the infrastructure itself, not any single product built on it. “The future of retail payments isn’t about creating a single new payment method, it’s about building infrastructure that can support continuous innovation,” he said. He pointed to the growth of Pay by Bank in retail, where account-to-account payments could give consumers more choice and merchants faster settlement at lower cost. Those benefits, he added, “will only be realised if the infrastructure behind them is right”, with strong customer authentication and data protection to guard against fraud.

Janine Hirt, chief executive of Innovate Finance, called the consultation “an important positive step forward in the development of this critical national infrastructure”, and set out what fintech firms want from it: “cheaper, faster, account to account payments settlement with greater capacity and more data capability”. She looked further ahead than most, arguing that the UK will need to ensure new forms of digital money, such as stablecoins and tokenised deposits, can be exchanged with cash and commercial bank deposits, and should weigh whether it needs a broader “orchestration layer” for settlement and common standards. Like Ducker, she pressed on pace. “These upgrades can and should be built quickly,” she said. “The next step is to turn this into a practical blueprint that can be actioned.”

Iana Dimitrova, chief executive of OpenPayd, focused on who the infrastructure is designed for. “The opportunity now is to design infrastructure frameworks that enable banks, fintechs, payment providers and digital asset businesses to innovate on a level playing field,” she said. “The design choices made in response to this consultation will determine whether that’s possible.”

The consultation closes on 11 September. The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board is then expected to turn the responses into a design for the infrastructure that will underpin UK retail payments into the next decade, with delivery overseen by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee alongside the FCA and the Payment Systems Regulator.