UK Retail Payments Infrastructure: moving from vision to design − speech by Victoria Cleland

It is a pleasure to join you this morning at the FTT Fintech Festival, with an exciting update on our journey to create a next generation retail payments infrastructure for the UK. And when I say “our journey”, I do not just mean the Bank of England. I do not just mean the other authorities. I mean everyone in this room, and the whole payments ecosystem. To design and deliver an infrastructure that is well used, trusted and truly valued requires strong collaboration between the public and the private sectors, between incumbents and fintechs, and between providers and users.

Payments are a key part of all our lives, and the lifeblood of the economy and of the financial system. And we need to keep them relevant in an ever-changing landscape. Technology, about which we are hearing so much at today’s Festival, is reshaping how payments are initiated and authorised. And demand is changing, with expectations of speed and functionality increasing as payments respond to our "always on" world.

So, what is our destination?

Last year the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC) ^{footnote [1]} outlined five key outcomes for a next generation infrastructure:

• greater choice of innovative and cost-effective payment options;
• interoperability across a multi-money ecosystem;
• protection from fraud and wider financial crime;
• fair and transparent access that supports competition and innovation; and
• an operationally and financially resilient payments ecosystem.

Together these will make a real difference for consumers and businesses, enhance resilience and support competition and innovation.

To help realise this ambition, the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB) was established. I chair the RPIB, which brings together a range of industry experts, with the FCA/PSR participating as an observer, to translate these PVDC outcomes into a high-level design for the core clearing and messaging infrastructure. Next Spring the Blueprint will be handed over to the industry led Delivery Company to deliver the new infrastructure.

We took an important step towards this in June this year when the RPIB issued a public consultation inviting respondents to help shape the design of the new infrastructure. The consultation asked what payment journeys the infrastructure should support; the principles and characteristics that should guide its design; and the role of the core infrastructure as a platform for innovation across the wider payments ecosystem.

Today, I want to explain what we heard, how that feedback is helping us on our journey from vision to design, and the next steps.

Respondents

First, I would like to say an enormous thank you to everyone who contributed to the consultation. I was really encouraged by the diversity of organisations responding and by the insightful feedback in the 121 responses. We received responses from: financial institutions, payment firms, technology firms, merchants, consumers as well as trade bodies, consultants and individuals. This feedback has been supplemented by a variety of roundtables, forums and discussions, with the high level of engagement underlining how important payments are to so many players.

Feedback demonstrated broad support for the direction of travel, and for moving at pace. Respondents saw the payment journeys, design principles and conceptual architecture as a strong basis for the next stage.

Of course, broad support does not mean that every detail has been agreed and every question has been answered. Important choices remain: where the boundary of the core should sit, how interoperability should work in practice, and how migration should be managed safely. But we have strong buy-in for the overall destination and we know the big questions that need to be addressed.

From feedback to design

I cannot do justice to all of the feedback this morning - there is far more detail in our published consultation response - but I would like to focus on a few of the key points that will be front of my mind as we move into the co-creation phase.

There was strong support for the proposed payment journeys: both the existing journeys and the new and emerging journeys including A2A at point of sale, payments between different forms of money, instant payments using aliases, advanced delegated payments, programmable and deferred payments. This endorsement was very good news, as ultimately payments need to meet users’ needs. And importantly the new infrastructure will enable not just different types of payments but also different types of money, with a core infrastructure that can support many different products. I sometimes refer to this as being able to plug and play products, be they faster payments, stablecoins, programmable payments and much more, into an infrastructure that supports future developments such as those being discussed at the Festival today.

Interoperability between these different forms of money, allowing a payer to initiate a payment in one form of money and a payee to receive it in another form of money frictionlessly and at par, was welcomed. This will be a crucial feature of the new infrastructure and will greatly enhance choice for consumers and scope for Fintechs to develop new solutions.

An ecosystem that prevents fraud and financial crime was a priority for respondents. While some features will be included in layers above the core, it is essential that the new infrastructure can support and enable effective controls across the ecosystem. They need to be designed in from the start.

Respondents were supportive of a ‘layered’ architecture ^{footnote [2]} for the wider payments ecosystem where the core infrastructure can act as a platform for innovation. They also welcomed the proposed modular and extensible approach, ^{footnote [3]} designed around common capabilities, rather than around each product in isolation. This should support existing payment journeys and provide a foundation to enable new products and forms of money to be included in the future. And extensibility will be key as the new infrastructure will need to be able to scale as payment volumes grow.

As we reflect on these responses, we will be considering that there was a preference for a relatively thin core, ^{footnote [4]} that is the element that will be common to all products. However, there was a range of views as to precisely how thin the core should be, and where certain capabilities should sit. Respondents placed varying levels of emphasis on the role shared services and common capabilities should play, and whether these should sit within the core.

There was little disagreement though on the crucial importance of security, resilience and cyber security, in particular, in the context of AI and developments in frontier technologies. Respondents emphasised secure, resilient, and adaptable infrastructure, with sufficient flexibility to support future requirements. We envisage a system that will be designed to exacting levels of operational resilience. And the core infrastructure will connect to the Bank’s RTGS service for settlement in central bank money, supporting confidence and financial stability by providing a safe and final means of settlement.

Respondents highlighted common messaging, interfaces and technical standards as important foundations for the new infrastructure. And these, together with ISO20022 messaging, a consistent implementation of standards, and strong governance would be important to support interoperability in its broadest sense.

There were many comments emphasising the importance of a smooth and safe transition to the next generation infrastructure. Planning the transition will be crucial and will need to draw on the input from many players, but it can only be planned once we have a clearer idea of what is being built and hence what is being transitioned to.

The core infrastructure is only part of the ecosystem

The next-generation infrastructure will be a critical layer of the UK retail payments ecosystem. But it is only one layer. It cannot deliver successful payment journeys on its own. Product and scheme arrangements, payment services providers, consumer protection, liability, merchant acceptance, commercial incentives, financial inclusion and access will all need to develop alongside the core. For the core we need to ensure that it can enable what is needed in the product layers that sit above it. And there is also a strong complementary role for the payments industry and financial institutions to leverage the core infrastructure to develop their product offerings to provide open, transparent and accessible payments. This an exciting opportunity to innovate, for all types of customers including the most vulnerable.

The PVDC set out its thinking on this wider picture in its July 2026 update on Roles and Responsibilities in the future Retail Payments Ecosystem. It is important now that the industry maintains momentum and stays focused, with Pay.UK continuing its vital role as Payment System Operator of the current systems, and the Delivery Company preparing to take forward the Blueprint for the next generation infrastructure.

What happens next

The valuable consultation responses, combined with insightful feedback from wider engagement, provide a strong foundation from which to develop the Blueprint for the next-generation infrastructure. This will set out the high-level design proposals to enable the Delivery Company to take forward the detailed design and delivery of the core.

We are now entering a period of co-creation, bringing together public and private sector expertise. This will enable the golden thread of public policy objectives to run through a design, with industry helping to shape the requirements in a way that will enable them to operate effectively. RPIB, the Design Authority, representatives from the Delivery Company, and industry experts will work together and incorporate feedback from this and our future outreach activities.

The Blueprint will then be handed over to the Delivery Company in Spring 2027, so that they can take forward detailed design, procurement, build and implementation. Ongoing public and private sector engagement will be important in ensuring that the design supports delivery of RPIB’s vision for the new infrastructure and can adapt to the changing technological and demand landscape.

This work does not mean that other innovation should stop and wait. We want it to continue, and we look forward to working with innovators so that it can align with the overall vision.

This is an exciting journey, and we need to keep up momentum. Our destination is a core infrastructure that enables: greater choice, more innovation, and a payments ecosystem that is operationally and financially resilient. The feedback from the consultation has added more detail to our map. And we have a route from high-level design to industry led delivery. I would encourage everyone to move in the same direction together, to point out safe short cuts, and to encourage other passengers to join along the way. The destination is one where we can all thrive.

I would like to thank Katie Britton and Sofia Edrihen Ruiz for helping with the preparation of these remarks.