On 11 September 2026, the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB) will close its consultation on the future of the UK’s retail payments infrastructure.
While it may sound like a technical exercise, the decisions being shaped now will have a significant impact on how payments work in the UK for years to come, making this a genuine milestone moment for the industry.
Chaired by the Bank of England, the RPIB is seeking views from across the industry on what the next generation of UK payments infrastructure should look like. This includes future payment journeys and design principles, as well as how the underlying infrastructure should interact with the wider payments’ ecosystem.
Launched on 25 June 2026, the consultation invited respondents to address 18 questions, helping to shape the vision for the infrastructure that will underpin UK retail payments in the years ahead.
At Icon Solutions, we welcome the ambition to renew the UK’s retail payments infrastructure and broadly support the direction of travel set out in the consultation. Drawing on more than 15 years of designing and delivering payments architecture in the UK and internationally, we believe the UK will be best served by a pragmatic, sequenced approach that delivers a smaller number of clearly defined capabilities well, rather than attempting to specify everything the industry might want in the future. Our response sets out six messages that follow from that view.
The core infrastructure should be thin, well-defined, and focused on a small number of essential functions. Clearing, settlement coordination, messaging and routing should sit here, while capabilities such as identity, alias resolution, fraud analytics and dispute handling should sit in overlay or service layers. International examples including Australia's NPP, Brazil's Pix, India's UPI demonstrate the value of maintaining a clear boundary between core infrastructure and services around it.
As the vision develops, it will be important to distinguish clearly between products, capabilities and outcomes. Immediate Payments and Recurring Payments are products; Programmability is an enabling capability; and payments across different forms of money is an interoperability outcome. Establishing these distinctions early will help define the infrastructure’s scope and provide a clearer foundation for future innovation.
The next phase should build on well-established industry standards and principles, such as the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI), which already provide an internationally recognised framework for safe and resilient financial infrastructure. Using established principles as the baseline would give the industry greater certainty, while allowing the RPIB to clearly identify where new approaches are needed.
The next stage provides an opportunity to bring greater clarity to some of the critical design choices ahead. These include how gross and net settlement should work within the future infrastructure, how interoperability between different forms of money could be delivered, and how participants – from wallet providers to FMI interlinkage – all could participate within the operating and regulatory model.
Choice will only be meaningful if different payment options are accessible at a comparable cost. Faster clearing should not become a premium service, particularly for small businesses managing tight working capital or individuals dependent on wages and benefits. The EU’s Instant Payments Regulation provides a useful precedent, requiring price parity between standard and instant payments while allowing participants to determine their own transaction limits.
Perhaps most importantly, the industry needs a clear, sequenced delivery roadmap over the next 3-6 months. A focused roadmap will be a critical next step to turning the ambition for next-generation payments infrastructure into something the industry can build and consumers can benefit from.
The UK has already learned a difficult lesson about what happens when ambition gets ahead of delivery. The New Payments Architecture (NPA) initiative, starting in 2017 with similarly broad ambitions, saw procurement paused, its scope narrowed through regulatory intervention and, ultimately, the programme discontinued. The point here is not to revisit old ground. It is to recognise that the lessons are still highly relevant.
Banks and PSPs cannot make meaningful investment decisions or commit major delivery programmes against an expansive list of ambitions without knowing what comes first, what comes next and when each stage is expected to happen.
That is why, at its core, our response is less about how much capability the UK's next-generation payments infrastructure should deliver, and more about how effectively it can be delivered. The opportunity is significant, but turning ambition into infrastructure that works will depend on discipline, prioritisation and delivery.
We’d love to hear what the industry thinks. Do you agree with our views, disagree with them, or have a different perspective on how the UK should approach its next generation of retail payments infrastructure?
Get in touch to discuss our ideas, challenge our thinking or share your own perspective.
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About Icon Solutions
Icon Solutions is a fintech company that has been designing and implementing state-of-the-art payments systems since 2009.
Our core product – the Icon Payments Framework (IPF) – is an internationally proven payments development framework that is trusted by Tier 1 banks across the globe such as Citi, NatWest, UBS and BNP Paribas.
IPF gives banks the technology and processes to independently accelerate the transformation of their payments infrastructure, allowing them to build, test and deploy payments processing solutions much faster, while staying in total control of timelines and costs.
For more information, visit iconsolutions.com.