In payments, timing is everything.
Transactions must land exactly when expected, systems must operate in sync, and any break in rhythm can expose risk across the entire chain. It is a discipline not unlike music, where coordination, control and consistency matter far more than speed alone.
For Paul Horlock, Chief Payments Officer at Santander UK, that parallel is more than metaphor. A long-time drummer returning to the kit after years away, he speaks of relearning timing, rebuilding coordination, and understanding how each movement connects to the whole. It is a useful lens through which to view modern payments, where real-time infrastructure, fraud prevention, and customer expectations must operate in lockstep.
Santander sits at the centre of that system. As a major UK retail bank, it faces the dual challenge of scaling innovation while maintaining trust across millions of transactions. In an environment shaped by mandatory APP reimbursement, the rise of account-to-account payments, and increasing scrutiny on fraud and resilience, the margin for error is narrowing.
As part of Payment Expert’s Executive Ledger series, Horlock discusses what a “consumer-first” payments strategy looks like in practice, how the bank is responding to real-time pressures, and why the industry may need to rethink its approach to innovation, trust and long-term sustainability.
Read the full interview below.
Santander has spoken about the need for a “consumer-first” payments strategy. What does that mean in practical terms?
We are predominantly a retail bank. So customer-first really means asking customers what they want and designing around that.
We carried out some research into this and, actually, what customers tell us is quite simple. They want payments to be safe, they want them to arrive on time, and they want confidence in what they’re doing. Around four out of five customers think what they have today works perfectly well for their needs.
For the one in five where it doesn’t, it’s usually because they’ve either been defrauded or they’ve experienced delays because we thought they might be at risk of fraud.
So the challenge for us is delivering that level of confidence and efficiency in how payments are assured. It sounds simple, but it’s very hard to do in practice.
What that means for us is focusing on innovation that is inherently safe and resilient by design. We’re not trying to be first to market with everything. We’re more of a fast follower, because we want to see how new solutions are adopted and make sure we can bring them to customers in a way that is safe.
That’s really what we mean by consumer-first.
Has the rapid growth of real-time payments made it harder to balance speed with customer protection?
Yes, it has made that balance more challenging.
I’ve been involved in this space for a long time, including work around open banking, which has driven a lot of that growth. One of the concerns has always been that the focus was on delivering the capability, rather than building the full protection layer around it.
Customers expect to be protected in the same way they are with cards, regardless of how they pay. But in reality, that level of protection isn’t always there in newer payment methods.
So there is a real tension between the speed of innovation and the need to meet those protection expectations. We have to be very careful about how we manage that.
There’s also a broader point around how we fund that protection. Protecting customers costs money, and as an industry we need to have an honest conversation about that. If we want payments to be safe, resilient and effective, with protection when things go wrong, then there needs to be a sustainable commercial model behind it.
We’ve seen that recognised in work from the Bank of England and the National Payments Vision, which talks about the need for a sustainable model. Open banking has gone through a phase of rapid development, but now we’re moving into a phase where we need to make sure it works commercially as well as technically.
That’s really where the focus is now — making sure we can support innovation while still protecting customers properly.
