RPIB consultation on the Design of the Future Retail Payments Infrastructure

1: Introduction

Background

The opportunity to renew the UK’s retail payments infrastructure

The UK’s retail payments infrastructure has historically been reliable, resilient and innovative, supporting a wide range of payment journeys for consumers and businesses. However, independent reviews^{footnote [1]}, alongside assessments of the UK and international payments landscape, have concluded that while the current system continues to perform well, the pace of technological change requires a more innovative approach to adapt to the evolving demands for domestic and cross-border payments.

More specifically, the Future of Payments Review, chaired by Joe Garner and commissioned by HM Treasury (HMT), identified increasing complexity in the payments landscape, with multiple in‑flight initiatives and a lack of a clearly articulated long‑term goal for the infrastructure. The Review noted that, although the UK has been a global leader in areas such as real‑time payments and Open Banking, without clear strategic direction and co-ordination, existing ongoing initiatives would be less likely to, in the future, support innovation, competition and user choice at scale. The Review also noted major shifts from cash to digital payments, rising fraud risks, and increasing expectations from end users and merchants. The Review therefore recommended that HM Government set a clearer strategic direction for retail payments.

Related challenges have also been identified at an international level. The G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross‑Border Payments, first published in 2020 and subsequently updated, established a co-ordinated international programme. This was aimed at making payments faster, cheaper, more transparent and more accessible, with a particular focus on improving outcomes for end users. While the Roadmap focuses on cross‑border payments, it underscores the importance of a modern, resilient and interoperable domestic payments infrastructure as a foundation for wider payments reform.

Strategic response: the National Payments Vision

The National Payments Vision (NPV), published by HMT in 2024 sets out the government’s ambition 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 resilient and adaptable retail payments infrastructure is a cornerstone of this ambition. The NPV recognised that the existing approach to infrastructure renewal, including long‑running upgrade programmes, lacked sufficient agility and strategic coherence to support key public policy goals. These goals include achieving innovative use cases and payment journeys in the UK, including account-to-account at the point of sale, interoperability between different forms of digital money, and improved cross-border payments. The NPV therefore called for a greater co-ordination in how the UK governs the design and delivery of retail payments infrastructure, grounded in clear strategic outcomes and stronger co-ordination between the UK authorities and the payments industry.

Following publication of the NPV, HMT established the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC)^{footnote [2]} comprising HM Treasury (HMT), the Bank of England (the Bank), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR). The PVDC was tasked with translating the NPV into a co-ordinated programme of work, including the strategy that the future infrastructure would need to deliver.

The role of the PVDC and RPIB

In November 2025, the PVDC published its Strategy for Future Retail Payments Infrastructure, which outlines a set of strategic outcomes to guide the renewal of the UK’s retail payments infrastructure (Table A). This will be supported by the new governance model intended to ensure that direction is set by the UK authorities, while detailed design and delivery draw on industry expertise (Figure 1).

The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB) has been established as an integral part of this new governance model. The RPIB is a senior advisory group, chaired by the Bank of England reflecting its critical role and experience as the operator of the UK’s Real Time Gross Settlement service (RTGS), bringing together representatives from across the payments ecosystem, including banks, payment service providers (PSPs), fintechs and merchants, with a strong focus on end user needs.

The RPIB’s core role^{footnote [3]} is translating the PVDC’s Strategy into a high‑level design for the future retail payments infrastructure (referred to in this document as ‘next-generation infrastructure’, ‘the core infrastructure’ or ‘the core’).^{footnote [4]} In this consultation, ‘core infrastructure’, at the very least, refers specifically to the central clearing and messaging infrastructure. It does not intend to address the wider services, access, scheme or settlement functions that together encompass the broader payments ecosystem and where change will be needed in parallel.

The RPIB designs the new core infrastructure, drawing on the expertise of its members and informed by consultation and engagement, within the framework set by the PVDC. To provide technical support, a Design Authority (DA) has been established as an RPIB sub-committee. The DA is chaired by the Bank of England and comprises (but not limited to) banks, building societies and fintech firms. It operates within RPIB’s remit and oversight. The RPIB does not set regulatory requirements.

Pay.UK will continue to operate the UK’s existing retail interbank payment systems, ensuring their safe and resilient running, delivering agreed enhancements, and providing input into the development of proposals for the next-generation infrastructure.

RPIB’s design work will be supported by a programme of structured engagement forums to gather input from across the payments ecosystem. This includes the Payments End User Forum, the Payments Innovation Design Group, and the Payments Academic Advisory Group (Figure 2). In addition, we will engage with stakeholders through targeted bilateral and multilateral discussions to ensure a wide range of perspectives are considered as the work progresses.

Purpose of this consultation

A key step towards achieving the PVDC Strategy is the development of a next-generation infrastructure for retail payments.

The next-generation infrastructure will provide a shared foundation for retail payments. It will support the UK’s monetary and financial stability, while enabling innovation and competition across the payments ecosystem to drive enterprise, economic growth; and adapt to opportunities and risks arising from a changing payments landscape.

This consultation is a key component in the RPIB’s design work. It will inform the RPIB’s work on the development of a high‑level design for the core infrastructure to be taken forward by an industry owned and led Delivery Company (DeliveryCo).

In developing the high-level design in the months ahead, the RPIB will need to navigate a number of opportunities, challenges and trade‑offs. Clarity of purpose, shared understanding and robust analysis will be critical to success. The responses to this consultation will play an important role in achieving this.

This consultation approaches the overarching question of what the core infrastructure must achieve from three complementary perspectives. These perspectives correspond to the three substantive sections that follow, each of which will be considered alongside each other:

1. Future payment journeys: What payment journeys should the core infrastructure support, ie what will ‘next-generation’ deliver for end-users? The high-level design must be grounded in the concrete outcomes we seek for UK households and businesses. Section 2 considers the payment journeys which the infrastructure should enable.
2. Design principles: What are principles and characteristics that should guide the design of core infrastructure? Section 3 considers a set of principles that should guide infrastructure design, including the ability to achieve the payment journeys we cannot foresee today. The principles should support navigating trade‑offs and decision-making. They should act as a guide rather than prescribing specific technical solutions.
3. The wider payments ecosystem: What role should the core infrastructure play within the wider UK payments ecosystem? Section 4 considers a technology‑agnostic conceptual architecture for the overall future retail payments ecosystem. The architecture provides a shared reference point for understanding the main layers of the ecosystem and the role of the core infrastructure within it. It also highlights some of the design options and cross‑cutting issues that arise from the role the infrastructure will play in the wider ecosystem.

Delivering the core infrastructure is a critical component of achieving the PVDC Strategy. Success will also require progress on two additional, related fronts:

• Ecosystem roles and responsibilities: As illustrated by the conceptual architecture later in this document (Figure 5), the core infrastructure is one – albeit critical – layer within a wider payments ecosystem. PVDC are expected to engage participants on their emerging thinking in relation to roles, responsibilities, and interactions across the payments ecosystem. Ecosystem participants and their relationships will ultimately ensure that innovation can be sustainable, competitive and commercially viable, supporting UK households and businesses.
• Successful products and services: The PVDC Strategy identifies a number of priority use cases, including initiatives such as account‑to‑account payments at the point of sale (A2A at PoS). The successful delivery and adoption of these payment journeys will depend on co-ordinated action by multiple organisations across the payment ecosystem. Operators of product level arrangements^{footnote [6]} and other delivery bodies responsible for developing and launching these products and supporting services will require clear strategic direction and sustained momentum from the UK authorities; alongside active engagement and investment from individual financial institutions to deliver and scale these payment journeys

Decisions taken in the design of the core infrastructure will shape, and be shaped by, the future retail payments ecosystem built around it. This includes the wider ongoing programme of work by HMT and the FCA to modernise payments regulation. It is therefore important that progress does not take place in isolation.

Figure 3 below sets out an indicative roadmap showing, at a high level, how the design, development and delivery of the next‑generation retail payments infrastructure could be staged, and how this work may relate to wider activity across the payments ecosystem. It is not intended to pre‑judge decisions on sequencing, timing or implementation, which will be subject to further design work, governance processes and industry engagement. The roadmap recognises the continued role of Pay.UK as operator of the UK’s existing retail interbank payment systems in ensuring the safe and resilient operations.

The consultation focuses on what the core infrastructure must achieve and the principles that should guide its design, rather than on detailed delivery plans. The roadmap is therefore provided as a visual aid to support discussion and shared understanding, rather than as a settled plan.

How to send your responses to this consultation

We welcome feedback from the public and stakeholders across the UK payments ecosystem, including but not limited to banks, fintechs, financial institutions, consumers, businesses, technology providers, academics, and payments sector professionals. The consultation will be open until 11 September 2026. Please see ‘Responding to this consultation’ for further details on how to send your responses.

2: What are ‘next generation’ retail payments?

What future payment journeys should the core infrastructure support, ie what will ‘next generation’ deliver for end-users? The high-level design must be grounded in the concrete outcomes we seek for UK households and businesses. This section considers the payment journeys which the infrastructure should enable.

The core infrastructure is central to delivering ‘next-generation’ retail payments and must support and facilitate a best-in-class retail payments ecosystem in the UK. The infrastructure should enable a high-quality experience for households and businesses – not only across today’s existing payment journeys, but also those that are yet to emerge. It should provide a foundation that can adapt as user needs, market structures and technologies evolve. It must act as a platform for continuing innovation.

This chapter first sets out the payment journeys that next-generation infrastructure could support from an end‑user perspective. It then considers how these journeys relate to, and could help deliver, the strategic outcomes set out in the PVDC Strategy.

End user payment journeys

Today’s interbank retail payment infrastructures – particularly Faster Payments System (FPS^{footnote [7]}) and Bacs^{footnote [8]} – enable a variety of payment journeys that remain critical to end users, although this is not an exhaustive list. Accordingly, the core infrastructure should continue to support the functionality of these payment journeys and, where possible, improve upon them.

In addition to existing journeys, there will also be a set of new and emerging payment journeys which are either not currently supported, or widely available, in the UK. The journeys outlined in Figure 4 below are illustrative and non-exhaustive. The pace of technological and economic change is rapid, so new payment journeys that we cannot yet foresee are likely to emerge in the coming years. The next-generation infrastructure should aim to be adaptable to these developments.

Existing payment journeys

A non-exhaustive list of key existing payment journeys which the core infrastructure should retain and, where possible, improve includes:

• Single immediate payments: Users can make, receive, request immediate payments between accounts, including person‑to‑person and person‑to‑business payments, as is currently possible through FPS.
• Batch payments: Users can make payments that group multiple transactions. For example, a business can create a batch file of employee salary payments, which is processed as a single batch, although each employee receives their salary as a separate transaction.
• Recurring or scheduled payments: Users can schedule payments in advance, with confidence that it will be executed on the chosen date and for the correct amount, even where the amount varies from period to period^{footnote [9]}. For example, an individual can set up recurring payments for utility bills or their monthly rent, which are made automatically at the end of each billing period.
• Cross border: Users can make and receive cross-border payments as it happens today but with reduced frictions and increased speed, while incurring lower and fewer costs. One potential way to deliver further improvements is through interlinking arrangements with overseas payment systems.^{footnote [10]}

New and emerging payment journeys

The core infrastructure should also enable a range of new and emerging payment journeys – some of which are not currently available at scale in the UK. These form part of our current proposals and would materially benefit end users and help to achieve the PVDC Strategy.

• Account‑to‑account payments at the point of sale (A2A at PoS): Users can make and receive account-to-account payments both in-store and in e-commerce, with instant confirmation of whether the payment is accepted or declined. Ensuring this journey has a user experience that is fast, reliable and user friendly would provide individuals and businesses with greater choice, and drive competition. This in turn could lead to improvements in functionality, service, and cost.
• Instant payments via aliases: Individuals and businesses can send money to, and request money from, each other using personal aliases (such as phone numbers or email addresses)^{footnote [11]}. This removes the need to input account details when making a payment. It would improve the ease and efficiency with which consumers and businesses make payments, as well as reduce manual errors.
• Advanced delegated payments: Users can grant permission to third parties to make payments on their behalf for specific purposes. This could support greater inclusion in society, for example where someone might authorise a carer or trusted person to assist with managing payments. In other cases, users might want to delegate some payment capability to AI agent^{footnote [12]} acting on their behalf, offering greater choice and convenience.
• Programmability: Users can create payment journeys with rules and conditions attached to the transfer of funds. These rules could be tailored to a wide range of end-user intentions and circumstances.^{footnote [13]}
• Deferred payments: Users can make certain account-to-account payments when there is low network connectivity or temporary loss of connectivity, which will be made once connectivity is restored, supporting user choice and increasing resilience in the payment ecosystem.
• Payments across different forms of money (interoperability): In addition to these payment journeys, if new forms of regulated private (such as regulated stablecoins)^{footnote [14]} or public money (such as a digital pound) were to emerge in the future, the core infrastructure could enable users with access to one form of money to seamlessly make payments to individuals with access to another form of money. The recipient could receive the payment in a different form of money to that which the payer made the payment in. This would require the core infrastructure to enable interoperability across multiple different forms of digital money.

In the coming years, additional payment journeys over and above those outlined above, or new variants of the above will likely emerge (Figure 4). This consultation seeks views from respondents on whether the above journeys are an appropriate baseline set to inform the design of the core next-generation infrastructure.

Achieving the PVDC Strategy

Delivering the payment journeys above in a way that achieves the PVDC Strategy will require more than just a new core infrastructure. There would need to be action across the payments ecosystem. Table B sets out the RPIB’s initial thinking on some of the enablers and the capabilities that the ecosystem would need to develop in due course, and how these map across to meeting the PVDC outcomes.

Product roadmap and transition plans

The migration of financial institutions from the current infrastructures to the next-generation infrastructure will pose a number of key challenges, as will the delivery of the products that would meet the PVDC Strategy’s outcomes. The sequencing of these steps would need to minimise transition risks, swiftly and steadily achieve the benefits of innovation for end users and manage costs for ecosystem participants.

Transition management is expected to be a key activity for DeliveryCo, working in co-ordination with Pay.UK and ecosystem participants. One possible approach could involve a staged transition, potentially including a defined and time‑limited period of dual‑running where needed, with the longer‑term objective of avoiding unnecessary complexity. At this stage, it is challenging to propose further detailed plans for transition and migration arrangements without greater clarity on what the next-generation infrastructure would deliver and how it would be built. A more detailed consideration of transition planning will therefore be addressed at a later stage, once the design and delivery approach for the infrastructure is more fully developed.

Any migration of financial institutions from the current infrastructure onto the future core infrastructure would need to be achieved in an orderly and well-executed manner. Migration planning would need to be sequenced and co-ordinated through close relationships and communication across the relevant operators, schemes and participants.

This consultation seeks respondents’ views on the expected challenges and considerations that should be taken into account when planning the transition from existing payment systems to next-generation infrastructure.

3: Design principles

What are principles and characteristics that should guide the design of the core infrastructure? There will be payment journeys that we want the infrastructure to support but which we cannot foresee today. Accordingly, this section considers a set of principles that should guide infrastructure design beyond the payment journeys outlined in the previous section. The principles should support navigating trade-offs and decision-making. They should act as a guide rather than prescribing specific technical solutions.

This consultation proposes a number of design principles for the core infrastructure. The RPIB considers that these principles are the means by which infrastructure design would help meet the PVDC’s five outcomes. Under the principles, the core infrastructure should meet a number of characteristics. These are as follows:

• Platform for innovation and competition
• Open access
• Common utilities and common standards
• Security and resilience
• Performance and scalability
• Protection from fraud and wider financial crime

Platform for innovation and competition

The core infrastructure should be designed to be:

• Modular: This means designing the core infrastructure as a combination of discrete, and self-contained components. This is so that over time, each component can be upgraded independently without needing to upgrade the whole system altogether.
• Extensible: This means new functionalities and capabilities can be added to the core infrastructure over time without requiring fundamental redesign or replacement of the entire core.

Taken together, these characteristics would support new payment products being developed and launched provided they meet certain standards to access the core – and this could be done without disruption, system‑wide change programmes, or high transition costs. This would enable a wider range of firms to innovate and compete using the core infrastructure.

Open access

The core infrastructure could be designed to facilitate fair and proportionate access for a wide range of different types of participants and supported by fair pricing arrangements. This is key to achieving safe innovation and choice by enabling firms to enter the market with new product offerings.

Open access could be supported through a number of policy and technology design choices, including the following:

• First, it could include allowing regulated firms which meet a clear and transparent set of criteria (for example, financial crime obligations, appropriate liquidity arrangements – if applicable, risk management and operational resilience standards, and other scheme-level considerations) to access the infrastructure – some of this could sit in the scheme layer (see Scheme and standards layer).
• Second, the platform could facilitate access through design choices that make technical integration as easy as possible. For example, the design could use standardised APIs, avoiding the need for firms to build their own custom solutions. This could lower barriers to entry for newer entrants.

Common utilities and common standards

The core infrastructure would have a series of capabilities available to direct participants (for example, certain regulated private money issuers, such as banks) that access the clearing layer. These would be balanced so as not to deter new entrants and allow for innovation. Where appropriate, these capabilities could also be made available to the ecosystem beyond the direct participants – provided as common utilities to the market, subject to appropriate governance and safeguards. These capabilities could include, for example, a common alias directory and fraud data analytics.^{footnote [18]} Some of these common utilities could be embedded within the core infrastructure, while others may be delivered outside of the core.

There could also be common technical standards for the infrastructure which are owned by the core infrastructure scheme^{footnote [19]}. The direct participants would adopt these standards, but the wider ecosystem may also wish to adopt them in order to benefit from the network effects.^{footnote [20]} The work in this space will be subject to further analysis and engagement, however, some of these technical standards could include, for example, shared payment data messaging standards, aliases, request-to-pay, credentials, and a universal contactless kernel at points of sale.^{footnote [21]}

Given the disparity in resources among PSPs, the common utilities ensure that innovation benefits the ecosystem as a whole, rather than a small subset of participants. This could enable more effective competition among a wider range of participants and increased choice for end users.

Security and resilience

The future core infrastructure should clear payment volumes reliably, even during disruptive events, such as high-severity cyber-attacks, prolonged third-party outages and technical failures. Its defence and surveillance capabilities should be designed to the highest National Technical Authorities-assured standards for cyber and physical security, and as such be able to identify emerging risks and detect any security and resilience issues promptly, limit their impact, and recover quickly when incidents occur. This should ensure that downtime is minimal and confidence in the payments system and the UK’s critical financial market infrastructures remain high.^{footnote [22]}

A secure and resilient system would reduce reliance on single points of failure and support geographic and operational distribution. A layered architecture could be deployed across multiple sites, with tiered contingencies and recovery objectives that could prioritise continuity of critical functions. This approach could allow individual components to be upgraded, maintained, or temporarily taken out of service without disrupting the operation of the wider set of components.

Performance and scalability

The core infrastructure, responsible for payment messaging and clearing, would need to be optimised to focus on its primary function of moving money (ie the liabilities of direct participants) safely and efficiently across participants.

The core infrastructure could be designed to support high-speed processing (the ability to complete individual payments quickly) and high throughput (the ability to process a large volume of payments over a given time). It should also be designed to be scalable, meaning it could handle sustained increases in transaction volumes without degrading performance.

Protection from fraud and wider financial crime

The core infrastructure could be designed to enable and support a greater level of detection of, and protection from fraud and wider financial crime. This would maintain trust as certain payment journeys become faster, more widely used, more interoperable, and more automated. The core infrastructure would not create a new consumer protection regime or redefine liability or reimbursement models. Its role would be to ensure the relevant protections can be applied as the new payment journeys emerge.

This could include standardised and proportionate risk controls across interoperable routes and forms of money, alongside end-to-end traceability and clear hand offs across multi-party payment journeys. As automated, delegated or programmable payments emerge, this could also include default safeguards, such as clear attribution of the initiation method, limits on automated activity, and recovery mechanisms.

4: The role of the next-generation infrastructure in a conceptual architecture

How might the core infrastructure fit within the wider UK payments ecosystem? This section considers a technology-agnostic conceptual architecture for the overall future retail payments ecosystem. The architecture provides a shared reference point for understanding the main layers of the ecosystem and the role of the core clearing and messaging infrastructure within it. It also highlights some of the design options and cross cutting issues that arise from the role the infrastructure will play in the wider ecosystem.

The conceptual architecture for the future retail payments ecosystem

Purpose of the conceptual architecture

The conceptual architecture brings together the outcomes, payment journeys and principles discussed in the previous chapters. It sets out a conceptual view of the future retail payments ecosystem, and the role the core infrastructure would play in it. The future retail payments architecture will continue to support existing payment methods, including cheques, alongside new and emerging payment journeys. This conceptual architecture does not represent a proposed design for the ecosystem. Rather, it provides a framework to organise concepts and ideas as the RPIB continues its work. Respondents are invited to challenge the structure, assumptions and proposed boundaries of the architecture as part of this consultation.

Achieving the desired outcomes for retail payments requires consideration of the wider payment ecosystem, not solely the design of the core infrastructure. The conceptual architecture, as described in Figure 5 (below), reflects the distinct but interdependent roles played by a number of different layers:

• End-user layer
• Access layer
• Product layer
• Messaging and clearing (core) infrastructure layer
• Settlement infrastructure layer
• Services layer
• Scheme and standards layer

Overview of the layered architecture

A layered approach has been used to describe the retail payments ecosystem.^{footnote [23]} Taken together, the layers provide an end‑to‑end view of retail payments, from initiation by end users through to final settlement in central bank money.^{footnote [24]}

Roles and interactions across layers

End-user layer

End users include individuals, households, businesses and public-sector organisations. This layer is the starting point for the payment journeys described in Section 2. End users interact with the payment system as payers (making payments) or payees (accepting payments). Their needs vary depending on context, including whether payments are time critical or planned, whether recipient details are known in advance, and whether additional assurances around fraud or payment certainty are required.

Access layer

The access layer entails the channels through which payments can be made and accepted. The key parts of the payment channel are the initiation of the payment and the payment’s acceptance. End users achieve initiation and acceptance through a range of form factors (eg e-commerce checkout, in-app payments, and programmatic payments (ie, via an API)).

The channels in the access layer connect end users to service providers that support payment journeys and, ultimately, to the core clearing and messaging infrastructure. Examples of access channels include mobile and web applications, e‑commerce platforms, point‑of‑sale environments, ATMs^{footnote [25]}, embedded payment experiences, and emerging channels such as Internet‑of‑Things devices or AI‑enabled interfaces.

In line with the PVDC Strategy, the UK authorities consider it important that the future access layer makes provision for physical in‑store account‑to‑account payments at the point of sale, alongside e-commerce journeys. Payments may be initiated and accepted using a range of form factors, including cards, wallets, tokens or QR‑based approaches. Standards play an important role in supporting consistency across the access layer.

Product layer

The product layer comprises of payment products that sit between access channels and the core infrastructure, enabling different payment journeys to be delivered to end users. These products combine underlying core infrastructure capabilities with capabilities from other layers to meet a range of user needs. Examples of payment journeys enabled by the product layer include A2A PoS, batch payments and cross-border payments (see Section 2 for the list of proposed payment journeys). Payment products act as a bridge between infrastructure capabilities and user‑facing experiences, enabling scalable and reusable payment propositions.

Core infrastructure (messaging and clearing) layer

The core infrastructure layer comprises the clearing and messaging functions that support the transfer and exchange of liabilities between regulated private money issuers, such as commercial banks and building societies, regulated stablecoin issuers, and e-money providers.^{footnote [26]} End users (both payers and payees) are the customers of these private-money issuers, while the issuers themselves are participants in the core infrastructure.

The core infrastructure would focus on a minimum set of essential functions, including:

• Clearing and settlement co-ordination: determining payment obligations between direct participants, supporting clearance and irrevocability, and generating outputs for settlement in central bank money as the ultimate risk-free asset.
• Core messaging and routing: supporting the exchange, validation, and routing of payment messages.
• Transaction processing and controls: validating transactions, managing batch and real‑time processing, and supporting transaction lifecycle management.
• Connectivity and access management: enabling intermediaries and service providers to connect to the core through standardised interfaces, including support for network access, authentication, and access control.^{footnote [27]}

Given that these capabilities would enable interoperability across multiple forms of private money, and support the singleness of money^{footnote [28]} and settlement finality,^{footnote [29]} they are of a systemic nature and critical to monetary and financial stability. End users will require assurance that the value of their money remains the same when converted between different forms, and control over which form of money they use and when. Accordingly, these capabilities in the core clearing and messaging layer must be underpinned by high standards of security, resilience, monitoring, risk management and governance.

Settlement layer

The settlement infrastructure supports the final discharge of obligations between financial institutions. In line with the PVDC Strategy and international standards such as the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures, the settlement layer will facilitate final settlement in central bank money for payments between customers of different money issuers.

The frequency of settlement will be considered further in due course. We will consider existing settlement models, ie net settlement,^{footnote [30]} alongside new arrangements that may be required.

Services layer

The services layer comprises capabilities that support payment journeys. Some services are integral to payment execution, while others enhance user experience or support risk management, competition and innovation.

An important design choice, with inherent trade-offs, stemming from this consultation will be around the extent to which certain services are either:

(a) delivered within the core infrastructure; or

(b) provided separately by ecosystem participants depending on the payments product and channel which end users would seek to access.

An initial, non‑exhaustive, list of services that could be considered for delivery within the next-generation ecosystem (whether offered within or outside the core infrastructure layer) includes:

• Data‑sharing capabilities: mechanisms that enable the standardised collection and sharing of core transaction data carried within payment messages, to support business functions such as fraud management. This may also enable additional analytics services to be developed by participants or service providers outside the core infrastructure.
• An alias or directory service: a service that enables individuals and businesses to make and receive payments using simple alternative identifiers (aliases), such as a phone number or an email address.
• Request‑to‑pay functionality: services that enable payees to request a payment from a payer, supporting a range of payment journeys such as person-to-person (P2P), bill payments and invoicing.
• Programmability capabilities: capabilities that enable new payment journeys that go beyond simple recurring payments, using rules, limits, and permissions to support more flexible behaviour.
• Identity management: services that support verification and authentication processes used in payment journeys, including the management of delegated authorities, subject to applicable legal and regulatory frameworks.
• Fraud analytics: services that assess fraud risk, detect patterns, and support investigation and recovery of funds.
• Switching service: a service that supports users in switching payment accounts or providers. A switching service helps to ensure that people and businesses can move between account providers easily and safely, supporting competition and improving choice.
• Cross-border interlinking: services that enable domestic payment journeys to interoperate with payment systems in other jurisdictions.
• Dispute management: a service that supports the handling, investigation, and resolution of payment disputes, errors, or complaints.

These services are intended to illustrate capabilities that may support the payment journeys described in Section 2. Additional services may be identified over time as user needs and payment journeys evolve.

Scheme and standards layer

The schemes and standards layer comprises governance arrangements and rulebooks that groups of ecosystem participants sign up to. A sufficient level of commonality across participants is required in some parts of the architecture to ensure interoperability and effective payment flows. In other parts of the architecture allowing scope for differentiation would support competition and innovation.

As mentioned in relation to the access layer, these standards could include common technical standards for the access layer including, potentially, a universal kernel, or API and QR code standards.

The shape of the broader retail payments ecosystem, built around the next-generation core infrastructure and the schemes and arrangements, will be taken forward by PVDC who will engage participants as this work progresses.

Cross-cutting design issues

This subsection explores the areas where design of the core infrastructure interrelates with choices made in other layers of the conceptual architecture outlined above, and where co-ordination across multiple layers may be required.

Interoperability between different forms of money

Interoperability in a multi-money ecosystem is a core policy goal for the next-generation infrastructure. This is explicitly set out in the PVDC Strategy.^{footnote [31]} This section provides a working definition of interoperability for the purposes of this consultation.

In the future there may be multiple forms of regulated private money providers who are direct participants with access to the core infrastructure. Banks and e-money providers already interoperate on the current infrastructure. A regulated stablecoin^{footnote [32]} might be a third form of private money provider to access the next-generation infrastructure. In addition, the UK Government and the Bank of England are exploring the case for a new form of public money – a digital pound (see Box A).

Consistent with this, different forms of regulated private money – subject to further assessment – including regulated stablecoins,^{footnote [33]} could access the next-generation infrastructure directly or indirectly, depending on their risk and regulatory profile and subject to appropriate governance and contractual arrangements.

Interoperability means that payers can initiate payments in one form of money (eg their bank deposit) and their payees can receive it in another form of money (eg their claim on a stablecoin). The liabilities are exchanged in the clearing and messaging layer frictionlessly and at par,^{footnote [34]} and settlement takes place in central bank money.

To achieve this effect in the clearing and messaging layers, there would also need to be co-ordination across the different forms of money issuers. This co-ordination would likely need to ensure their combined participation in the schemes and standards layer, the services layer, the access layer, and the end-user functionalities layer. Interoperability is therefore a cross-cutting issue that will require further consideration, including insofar as design, governance and operational issues are concerned. Experimentation could also play a role in supporting this.

Settlement frequency and liquidity implications

Different payment journeys place different demands on settlement and the supporting liquidity arrangements. The UK’s retail payment systems settle in central bank money on a net settlement basis.^{footnote [35]} Other jurisdictions employ alternative approaches, including arrangements where gross settlement^{footnote [36]} plays a significant role.

Settlement in central bank money provided by the Bank of England’s RTGS service will continue to apply to the next-generation infrastructure. However, supporting the broader range of payment journeys outlined in Section 2 of this consultation may require consideration of whether a new approach to settlement frequency is required. This issue transcends the design of the core infrastructure layer – and it will require further consideration in due course. This additional work will explore what implications different settlement arrangements would have for throughput,^{footnote [37]} liquidity management, systemic risk, competition and participant requirements.

Consumer protection, fraud and wider financial crime

Effective consumer protection and prevention of fraud and wider financial crime^{footnote [38]} are critical to maintaining confidence as payment journeys become faster, more interoperable and increasingly automated. In the UK, these outcomes are delivered through a combination of statutory regulation (including by the FCA and the PSR, within their respective remits), payment scheme rules, and controls applied by the ecosystem participants.

The next-generation infrastructure is not intended to establish a new consumer protection or reimbursement regime, nor to alter existing liability arrangements. However, as per the Design Principles outlined in Section 3, there are design choices which could help existing protections operate more consistently and effectively to successfully achieve the new payment journeys set out in Section 2.

Infrastructure design can shape what information is available, when checks can be applied, and how co-ordination occurs across participants, with implications for the likelihood, scale and distribution of fraud and wider financial crime.

Potential design considerations

Effective consumer protection and prevention of fraud and wider financial crime cut across the next-generation ecosystem. Risks can arise across multiple layers of the payment ecosystem, including payment initiation, messaging, clearing, supporting service, and the rules and controls applied by schemes and firms. Effective protection therefore depends on co-ordinated action across next-generation infrastructure, schemes, PSPs and market services, rather than on any single control or actor in isolation. In considering these matters, it is important to maintain a clear separation between: (i) capabilities that infrastructure may enable or support; and (ii) the scheme rules and regulatory frameworks that determine how protections are applied in practice.

From a next-generation infrastructure perspective, this raises a number of potential design considerations.

1. Consistent fraud and wider financial crime prevention across interoperable payments. Infrastructure could support more consistent prevention across interoperable payment routes and forms of money, without redefining liability or reimbursement models. Illustrative examples include:

• Verified payee credentials and enhanced ‘confirmation of payee’ style services that operate across product level arrangements and interoperable routes, helping to reduce misdirection and impersonation fraud.
• Stronger payee and merchant identification, including common identifiers or credentials, increasing confidence that payments are made to the intended counterparty.
• Pre-transaction warning signals that can be triggered consistently across channels and forms of money where elevated fraud risk is detected.

2. Better data to support prevention and detection. Infrastructure could support richer, more standardised and more timely data flows to strengthen the prevention and detection of both fraud and wider financial crime. For example:

• Standardised transaction data and messaging, enabling PSPs to apply monitoring and analytics more effectively and consistently.
• Secure sharing of fraud relevant signals, such as risk indicators or emerging scam typologies, between PSPs in near real time – particularly for scams and authorised push payment fraud.
• Network level monitoring and analytics, supporting system wide visibility of emerging threats without centralising decision making or customer relationships.

In the context of wider financial crime, such capabilities could help firms apply existing anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions and counter-terrorist financing controls more effectively across interoperable payment routes and new forms of payment initiation.

3. Improved traceability and co-ordination when things go wrong. Infrastructure design could improve traceability and co-ordination across multi-party payment journeys, supporting more consistent consumer outcomes in cases of error, delay or fraud. Examples include:

• End to end traceability and audit trails across interoperable payments, enabling quicker investigation and recovery.
• Standardised status messages and timestamps, reducing ambiguity about execution, failure or delay and supporting faster resolution of errors and disputes.
• Clear hand offs between participants, reducing gaps where responsibility for prevention or response might otherwise be unclear.

4. Default safeguards for new and emerging payment journeys. As new types of payment journeys emerge – such as programmable payments that follow pre‑set rules or agentic payments initiated by software on a user’s behalf – payment infrastructure will need to be designed with effective safeguards built in by default. Examples include:

• Limits, controls and monitoring that apply to programmable or agentic payments as robustly as to user-initiated payments.
• Clear attribution of the initiation method (for example, user initiated versus not), supporting appropriate fraud controls and consumer understanding.
• Fallback and recovery mechanisms where automation or conditional logic fails, helping to prevent small errors from escalating into consumer harm.

Informed by responses to this consultation, we expect to undertake further work to assess which consumer‑protection and fraud‑prevention capabilities are most appropriately enabled or co-ordinated at the core infrastructure level.

Enabling priority and emerging payment journeys

This subsection examines the cross-cutting issues that might apply to some of the specific new and emerging payment journeys outlined in Section 2.

Account-to-account at point of sale

Supporting account-to-account payments at the point of sale (A2A at PoS) both in-store and online is a priority identified in the PVDC Strategy, reflecting the UK’s ambition to foster innovation and competition. If designed effectively, A2A at PoS could offer potential benefits including:

• greater choice for consumers,
• potentially lower^{footnote [39]} and more transparent acceptance costs for merchants, and
• an alternative retail payment channel that may strengthen operational resilience across the ecosystem.

To be a meaningful option in the UK market, such payments would need to deliver outcomes comparable to existing methods, including certainty of fate,^{footnote [40]} speed and reliability. In practice, this may require near‑instant confirmation to merchants that a payment has succeeded or failed, providing sufficient certainty to release goods or services at the point of sale. This certainty of fate is especially important in fast turnaround retail environments, such as transport^{footnote [41]} and supermarkets, where payment speed and reliability are essential to both the customer experience and merchant viability.

Beyond requirements on the design of the core infrastructure, for A2A at PoS to become a ubiquitous payment journey in the UK there would need to be action in the end user and access layers too. For example, this would include ensuring payments can be initiated and accepted in store. This would require integration with PoS infrastructure and identifying clear approaches to communication technologies, such as near-field communication (NFC) or QR codes, and form factors such as digital wallets, as well as identifying key supporting services such as identity or alias solutions. In due course, these might also include the emergence of a universal kernel for A2A at PoS – designed to work with existing and future PoS terminals – to make A2A at PoS payments consistent and reliable.

Beyond technical capability, enabling A2A at PoS would require a clear and consistent governance framework, likely overseen by product level arrangements,^{footnote [42]} that could give end users and PSPs clarity and confidence in this payment method. This could include a scheme rulebook and requirements which set out the baseline user experience, minimum levels of consumer protection, fraud and dispute handling, and transparent commercial arrangements for merchants, PSPs, and other relevant ecosystem participants. International experience suggests that recognisable schemes and branding, predictable user journeys, and consistent protections are key in building trust and supporting adoption across end users and merchants (see Box D).

Cross-border payments

Improving cross‑border payments is a longstanding public policy objective for the UK and the G20. Next-generation infrastructure could act as an enabler of improved cross‑border outcomes, including through interlinking with domestic fast payments infrastructures in other jurisdictions.

Cross‑border A2A payments require effective connection of payment systems in different jurisdictions. Next-generation infrastructure could seek to achieve this by making it easier for financial intermediaries to establish those connections, and by enabling bilateral and multilateral connections between foreign payment systems. Interlinking has the potential to improve efficiency, resilience and user outcomes across a range of cross‑border payment journeys.

Interlinking arrangements cannot be achieved through the future infrastructure alone. It would depend on alignment and co-ordination across multiple layers of the architecture and across-borders. This could include messaging and data standards, liquidity arrangements, access and participation rules, compliance frameworks and financial crime controls. Decisions taken across the architecture, not just within the core infrastructure, could shape the UK’s ability to interlink with other jurisdictions, and determine how scalable, resilient and adaptable interlinkages could be over time. Misalignment of standards, particularly in messaging and consumer due diligence, remains a major source of friction in cross-border payments to and from the UK today.

There is no one‑size‑fits‑all approach to addressing the challenges facing cross-border payments. The challenges often vary by corridor^{footnote [44]} and by payment journey (for example, remittances versus in‑store payments by tourists), and progress would require decisions around prioritising links with certain jurisdictions, payment systems and capabilities.

Programmable payments

Programmability^{footnote [45]} has the potential to provide far greater choice and empowerment to end users in making and receiving payments. In addition, it could also reduce friction by automating routine processes, improving the functionality of existing payment journeys as well as enabling new ones, and preventing fraud and wider financial crime.^{footnote [46]} However, programmability raises important considerations around performance, resilience, and legal and governance considerations. From a core infrastructure design perspective, the key issue is compatibility with programmability, rather than embedding complex logic within the core.

Conditional and event‑driven payments can increase demands on performance, resilience and availability, as they may introduce additional processing steps, dependencies and potential latency,^{footnote [47]} particularly in high‑volume or time‑critical environments such as public transport. Core infrastructure design choices around throughput will therefore shape what types of programmable patterns can be supported reliably at scale.

At a minimum, the infrastructure could be compatible with common enabling patterns, such as the ability to support conditional hold and release of funds, enriched messaging and data fields to allow automation, and clear handling of failure or timeout scenarios.^{footnote [48]} Design choices must remain compatible with settlement finality and legal certainty (including clear enforceability and allocation of responsibility where payment execution is automated).

Programmability also depends on capabilities that typically sit beyond the core infrastructure. These could include rules and product level arrangements, consent and transparency approaches, liability and dispute handling, and governance arrangements where multiple parties contribute to a programmable outcome.

Enabling programmability at scale is therefore likely to require some common baseline capabilities across the ecosystem, such as agreed conditional hold and release models and fallback rules during outages. Without co-ordination, for example in the form of product level arrangements, approaches could diverge, increasing costs and fragmentation.

Agentic payments and advanced delegation

Agentic payments, where autonomous agents initiate payments within defined parameters, could support new forms of commerce and user experience. They also raise questions around consent, accountability, performance and trust that extend beyond infrastructure design alone and require ecosystem‑wide co-ordination.

Agentic AI could enable a new form of commerce in which autonomous digital agents act on behalf of users to plan, make decisions and initiate payments within clearly defined parameters. In a payments context, this could include agents that compare prices, select payment methods and initiate transactions, or that procure goods and services automatically when predefined conditions are met. Over time, such agent‑initiated transactions could apply across a range of payment relationships, including person‑to‑business, person‑to‑person and business‑to‑business use cases.

These developments could support public policy objectives by improving user experience through more convenient and personalised payment journeys, widening user choice and strengthening competition between merchants and payment methods. By embedding payments more seamlessly into automated digital journeys, agentic models could also make a broader range of payment rails viable, including lower‑cost options, and support new commercial and business models. In some contexts, continuous monitoring by agents may also help mitigate certain forms of fraud.

Design choices in relation to the core infrastructure should avoid limiting the ability to support agentic payments. However, agentic payments also raise important policy and design challenges, many of which sit beyond the core infrastructure. These include how users understand and control what agents are permitted to do, who is accountable when transactions go wrong, how agent‑initiated transactions are identified, and how agents are authenticated. Without co-ordination, technical and governance approaches could diverge, increasing costs and leading to inconsistent levels of trust and protection.