The Bank of England has opened a consultation on the design of the United Kingdom’s next-generation retail payments infrastructure. The consultation, launched by the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board on 25 June 2026, covers the core clearing and messaging systems underlying UK retail payments, rather than the consumer-facing products and services built on top of them.
The initiative forms part of the National Payments Vision, the strategic framework HM Treasury established in November 2024. Delivery is overseen by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee, chaired by HM Treasury alongside the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Payment Systems Regulator. The consultation period runs until 11 September 2026.
The exercise carries particular weight given the UK’s prior attempt to modernise its payment rails. The New Payments Architecture, a large-scale programme run by Pay.UK, operated for close to a decade before being scaled back, after which the government concluded in the National Payments Vision that a more agile and flexible approach was required. That history has shaped much of the industry response to the current consultation.
What the Consultation Covers
The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board, a senior industry body chaired by the Bank of England, is seeking input on the underlying clearing and messaging infrastructure that supports UK retail payments, distinct from the products and services individual firms build using that infrastructure. Following the close of the consultation on 11 September, the board is expected to translate responses into a design for the infrastructure intended to underpin UK retail payments over the next decade, with delivery overseen jointly by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee, the FCA, and the Payment Systems Regulator.
How Industry Stakeholders Are Responding
Andrew Ducker, senior payments consultant at Icon Solutions, characterised the consultation as an opportunity to shift the conversation from strategy toward implementation, noting that the industry does not require another extended cycle of discussion without corresponding delivery. He outlined a two-stage approach: near-term improvements to existing rails such as Bacs and Faster Payments within three years, followed by next-generation infrastructure development over a subsequent seven-to-ten-year horizon. He said the board’s priority following the consultation must be establishing a clear, credible, and actionable roadmap to give industry the confidence to invest.
Mike Walters, co-founder and chief executive of Form3, framed the objective as building infrastructure capable of supporting continuous innovation rather than a single new payment method. He pointed to the growth of Pay by Bank in retail commerce, where account-to-account payments could offer consumers greater choice and merchants faster settlement at lower cost, adding that these benefits depend on the underlying infrastructure being designed correctly, including strong customer authentication and data protection safeguards against fraud.
Key Factors Shaping Industry Priorities
Janine Hirt, chief executive of Innovate Finance, described the consultation as an important positive step in developing critical national infrastructure, and said fintech firms want cheaper, faster account-to-account payment settlement with greater capacity and expanded data capability. She also raised a longer-term consideration: that the UK will need to ensure new forms of digital money, including stablecoins and tokenised deposits, can be exchanged with cash and commercial bank deposits, and suggested the country should evaluate whether it requires a broader orchestration layer for settlement and common standards. She echoed Ducker’s emphasis on pace, stating that the upgrades can and should be built quickly, and that the next step is converting the consultation into a practical, actionable blueprint.
Iana Dimitrova, chief executive of OpenPayd, focused on the intended beneficiaries of the infrastructure, stating that the opportunity is to design frameworks enabling banks, fintechs, payment providers, and digital asset businesses to innovate on a level playing field. She noted that the design choices made in response to the consultation will determine whether that outcome is achieved.
Costs and Implementation Implications
The consultation does not itself commit to specific expenditure or delivery timelines; it is a design and input-gathering exercise ahead of a subsequent infrastructure build. Several respondents have implicitly flagged that the practical cost of the initiative lies less in the consultation phase and more in whether the resulting roadmap secures sufficient industry investment and sustained delivery focus over the multi-year horizon Ducker described.
Risks and Limitations
The most consistently raised risk among industry respondents is precedent-based: the New Payments Architecture programme demonstrates that large-scale UK payments infrastructure initiatives can extend over many years and still require significant scaling back before completion. Multiple respondents, including Ducker and Hirt, explicitly cautioned against a repeat of prolonged strategic discussion without corresponding implementation. Additional uncertainty surrounds unresolved design questions, including whether an orchestration layer for settlement across stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and commercial bank money will be pursued, and how a level playing field between banks, fintechs, and digital asset businesses would be operationalised in practice.
Outlook
Following the close of the consultation period in September 2026, the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board is expected to begin translating industry responses into an infrastructure design, with delivery overseen by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee alongside the FCA and Payment Systems Regulator. Whether the resulting roadmap avoids the extended timeline and eventual scale-back experienced by the New Payments Architecture programme will depend on decisions made in the design phase that follows the consultation, rather than on the consultation itself.
Conclusion
The Bank of England’s consultation on UK retail payments infrastructure represents an early design stage within the broader National Payments Vision framework, with industry stakeholders broadly welcoming the initiative while emphasising that its ultimate value will be judged on subsequent implementation rather than the consultation process itself. The consultation closes on 11 September 2026, after which the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board is expected to move toward a formal infrastructure design.
