Consultation opens on next generation of UK payments infrastructure

Work is underway to shape the future of the UK's retail payments infrastructure. A new consultation invites views on future payment journeys, design principles for core systems and cross-cutting issues such as digital identity, agentic payments and fraud. Design choices made now will shape innovation and competition in UK payments for years to come.

Consulting on the future of payments

The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board is consulting on the design of the UK’s future retail payments infrastructure. The Board, which is chaired by the Bank of England, brings together experts from across the industry to help bring to life the government’s vision for UK payments. The consultation closes on 11 September 2026.

Three questions are at the heart of the consultation:

1. Next gen payments: What future payment journeys should core payments infrastructure support?

2. Design principles: What are principles and characteristics that should guide the design of the core infrastructure?

3. Conceptual architecture: How might the core infrastructure fit within the wider UK payments ecosystem?

Lots of elements come together to make payments work. The Board’s consultation focuses on the central clearing and messaging systems, on which everything else (such as payment services and user interfaces) can build.

Next gen payments

Technology is changing the payments landscape. A redesigned infrastructure will need to enable a wider range of payment functionality. New and emerging payment journeys include:

• Account-to-account (A2A) payments at point of sale

• Instant payments via aliases such as phone numbers or email addresses instead of sort codes and account numbers

• Advanced delegated payments, including giving authority to AI agents

The infrastructure will also need to adapt to allow people to use new forms of money as they evolve. These may include regulated stablecoins or a digital pound. Enabling users to receive payments in a different form of money to the one the payer made the payment in would require the core infrastructure to be interoperable across multiple forms of digital money.

The consultation seeks feedback on what payment journeys should be supported by core infrastructure. The Board says that this should not be limited to payment journeys that exist today.

Design principles

The Board has proposed a set of principles to guide the design of the UK’s infrastructure so that it is ready to support additional payment journeys that are yet to emerge. These include:

• Making the design modular and extensible so that components can be upgraded or added without major disruption

• Allowing regulated firms open access to the infrastructure and making technical integration as easy as possible

• Adopting the highest standards for cyber and physical security to build operational resilience

• Supporting protection from fraud, for example by standardising risk controls and providing end-to-end traceability

The Board asks if there are additional or alternative design principles that it should apply and whether there are any which should be prioritised over others.

Conceptual architecture

The Board provides a framework to organise its conceptual view of the future retail payments ecosystem, comprising several layers one of which is the core functionality of messaging and clearing infrastructure. For example, with reference to the access layer, the Board suggests examples of channels through which payments can be made and accepted, such as cards, wallets, tokens and QR codes.

An important design choice relates to the services layer. The consultation asks whether certain services, such as identity management, fraud analytics and request-to-pay functionality, should be delivered from the core infrastructure (and so governed as a utility) or sit outside it (and so left to market competition). The Board recognises that there are trade-offs to consider between these two options.

The consultation also asks several questions about cross-cutting issues, including settlement frequency, consumer protection and improving cross-border payments. On agentic payments, the Board considers that the most important policy questions (such as how users control what agents are permitted to do and who is accountable when transactions go wrong) sit outside the design of the core infrastructure. In any case, the consultation says that design choices in relation to the core infrastructure should avoid limiting the ability to support agentic payments.

Transition planning

Financial institutions will need to migrate to the future core infrastructure. The Board notes that this transition will need to be managed carefully to minimise the risk of disruption. The consultation suggests that one approach could be a staged transition, including a period where the new systems run alongside existing retail interbank payment systems.

Background

In 2024 the government set its National Payments Vision for a trusted, world‑leading payments ecosystem, delivered on next generation technology, in which consumers and businesses have a credible choice of payment methods to meet their needs.

A Payments Vision Delivery Committee, comprising HM Treasury, the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and Payment Systems Regulator, is tasked with translating the Vision into a programme of work. The PVDC has set the framework under which the Board will provide a high-level design for the core infrastructure for an industry-owned Delivery Company to take forward.

Next steps

This consultation, which closes on 11 September 2026, is an early milestone in what will be a multi-year programme to redevelop the UK’s retail payments infrastructure. The Board will use the feedback it receives to finalise a high‑level design which the Delivery Company will take forward later this year. These early design decisions will determine key elements of future development, including who can access the new infrastructure, on what terms and what services can be built on top of it.