On 15 July 2025, HM Treasury (HMT) published an update on the work of the “Payments Vision Delivery Committee” (PVDC) to set out the organisational structure for designing and delivering the future retail payments infrastructure for the UK.
Make no mistake, this has significant implications for banks and PSPs offering instant payments services and will define the strategy not only for upgrading the Faster Payments System (FPS), but also on what could follow that. Banks now need to move quickly to develop plans for their own instant payments systems.
The PVDC was set up in November 2024 to realise the National Payments Vision (NPV) – which sets out the ambition for a world-leading payments ecosystem – and comprises representatives from the government (HMT), central bank (Bank of England), and key regulators (Financial Conduct Authority [FCA], Payment Systems Regulator [PSR]). Crucially, it is supported by the ‘Vision Engagement Group’ comprising 30 senior payments industry representatives.
The 15 July announcement fulfils the PVDC’s stated intention to “set out within six months an approach for the development and delivery of the UK’s retail infrastructure needs and the required governance and funding model to achieve it, including proposals for the reform of Pay.UK”.
The PVDC update focuses on the public-private approach for running and changing the UK’s central or interbank payments infrastructures. Here’s what we now know:
As you see, the update does not actually address what payment infrastructure the UK should build. For that, we must wait for the PVDC to publish its strategy for retail payments infrastructure “in the autumn”.
For banks offering real-world payment services, the temptation might be to hit the snooze button, doze off for a few months while the organisational structure is established, and await the autumn update.
We think this would be a mistake. The new structure marks a key development that stands to restore the momentum for upgrading the UK’s retail payments infrastructure. We therefore expect the pace of progress to now increase.
The autumn strategy will be hugely significant – setting the agenda for what the RPIB and Delivery Company will be tasked with designing and implementing.
What will this look like? Following the eventual demise of the former ‘New Payments Architecture’ programme, Pay.UK has spent the last 15 months, under instruction from the PSR, driving an agenda for delivering priority enhancements to FPS. While still under discussion, these enhancements will likely go forward in some form as a first phase of the strategy.
Yet long-term ambitions will extend far beyond FPS enhancements. The strategy will likely also encompass the potential role for retail digital currencies (issued either by the central bank, by commercial banks or by non-banks) and tentatively explore the future of BACS – which remains in high demand for bulk credits (e.g. payroll and batch invoice payments) and all our direct debits.
This means that we anticipate the strategy will include clear positions on how the UK’s instant payment architecture should be developed to:
In response, banks need to develop their own plans for upgrading their UK infrastructure to better support today’s instant payments services and roadmap, while enabling other payment services to eventually move onto instant payments rails.
This involves:
While the to-do list may look extensive, banks don’t necessarily have to start from scratch. Despite its ultimate demise, much of the analysis work conducted in preparation for the former New Payments Architecture programme could still prove useful and feed into this new activity.
We are at the start of what stands to be an exciting journey for the UK’s instant payments infrastructure. Icon’s extensive work with our clients to develop payments strategy, architecture designs and drive implementations – coupled with our understanding of the past, present and future of instant payments in the UK and beyond – can help banks navigate the transition ahead and realise the full potential.