Retail Payments Infrastructure Board Launches Consultation on Next-Generation UK Payments Infrastructure

The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board launched a consultation on the future design of the UK's next-generation retail payments infrastructure, the Bank of England said on June 25.

The Bank's news release calls the launch a major milestone in the modernisation of the UK's payments landscape. The RPIB is the board charged with steering the renewal of the UK's retail payments infrastructure — the systems that clear and settle everyday payments between banks.

What is confirmed is the June 25 launch and the Bank's framing of it as a modernisation milestone. The design options under consultation, the response deadline and the intended timetable for building the new infrastructure were not carried in the feed and remain unverified here; as a consultation, the exercise gathers views before decisions are taken.

Background

The UK's retail payments — salaries, direct debits, account-to-account transfers — run largely over the Faster Payments Service, which handles near-instant transfers, and Bacs, the older batch system behind direct debits and direct credits. Both are decades-old in design, and replacing them has been among the longest-running projects in UK financial infrastructure: an earlier industry-led effort, the New Payments Architecture, made slow progress across years of planning.

The government's National Payments Vision, published in 2024, called for a reset of the upgrade effort and clearer leadership of retail infrastructure renewal — the strand of work from which the RPIB emerged, with the Bank of England and regulators taking a more direct steering role. The stakes are wide: the systems in question underpin day-to-day payments for households and businesses across one of the world's largest financial centres, and design choices on messaging standards, settlement models and access for non-bank firms shape competition in payments for decades.

What comes next

The consultation runs on terms set out in the Bank's release, with a response deadline not carried in the material here. The customary sequence for such an exercise is a feedback statement followed by design decisions; watch for those as the signal of when specification moves toward procurement and build.