Nuala Jackson, Director of Payments at UK Finance, sets out the trade body’s position on the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board’s (RPIB) consultation on the design of the future retail payments infrastructure.
The Bank of England-chaired board published the consultation on 25 June 2026, and it closed on 11 September 2026.
The consultation sought views on future payment journeys, design principles and the role of the core clearing and messaging infrastructure, which an industry-led Delivery Company will build.
The UK has reached a pivotal moment in the evolution of its payments infrastructure. The choice is clear: recreate the systems of the past or build for the future.
Looking to the future, it may be tempting to follow a familiar path and simply update what we already have. Building what we know can appear less costly, less complex and less risky than innovating for the future. But that would be a mistake.
That’s why UK Finance strongly supported the direction of travel set out by the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB). Now, as the programme moves into its next phase, there are several issues that we must get right.
UK Finance’s priorities for the next phase
Firstly – we must start with what people need and go from there. UK Finance, and the wider industry, have extensive insight into how modern consumers and businesses are paying.
This data should form the basis of how we design for the future – taking into consideration issues like better fraud prevention, effective cross-border payments and the ways in which we’ll embrace different forms of money and providers. We can’t answer tomorrow’s questions by looking just at what we have today.
Secondly – predicting exactly what the payments market will look like in ten or twenty years is impossible. That’s why it makes no sense to deliver infrastructure that requires this level of foresight.
Instead, we must embrace adaptability as a core design principle, ensuring that individual components can evolve without requiring the whole system to be redesigned. Not only will this deliver better services – it will also save money in the future, avoiding another costly wholesale replacement programme.
Thirdly – financial institutions and payment providers have first-hand experience of how today’s infrastructure operates, where the friction exists and what will be required to migrate safely. They also have the direct insights of what consumers and businesses need from any new system.
As such, sustained engagement between the Bank of England, HM Treasury, regulators and industry will be vital in ensuring any future design works well.
UK Finance calls for phased delivery and resilience from the outset
While the opportunities seem endless – pragmatism is key. There’s no point trying to deliver everything at once, particularly when there are still important choices to be made about what should and should not be included in the common payments infrastructure.
As these decisions develop, a clear plan will ensure that our long-term ambition for the future can be met via pragmatic, phased delivery as opposed to all-at-once.
The Bank of England and the RPIB will need to establish clear criteria to inform this – but UK Finance is clear that these efforts should be laser focused on establishing those measures that genuinely benefit from being provided commonly across the ecosystem. This must not inadvertently compromise competition and innovation across the sector.
Finally – payments systems are critical national infrastructure. Ambitious plans must consider operational resilience, security and the ability to move from one system to another safely. These are measures that need to be adopted at the outset and not simply considered later.
In short – the UK’s position as a global payments leader depends on its ability to remain competitive, innovative and adaptable. During an era of rapid change, our ambition shouldn’t be focused on the status quo. We now have a rare opportunity to build the foundations for the future of UK payments – and we should embrace it.
