The Bank of England’s Victoria Cleland said on Wednesday that 121 responses to a June consultation backed the direction of the next-generation UK retail payments core, with design choices still open.
Cleland, who chairs the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB), told the FTT Fintech Festival that the RPIB will hand a Blueprint to an industry-led Delivery Company in Spring 2027. That body will then take forward detailed design, procurement, build and implementation.
“Feedback demonstrated broad support for the direction of travel, and for moving at pace,” she said. Respondents included financial institutions, payment firms, technology firms, merchants, consumers, trade bodies, consultants and individuals.
The RPIB brings together industry experts, with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) taking part as an observer.
Its task is to turn five outcomes set by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC) last year into a high-level design for the core clearing and messaging infrastructure.
Respondents preferred a relatively thin core, meaning the element common to all products. Cleland said views differed on exactly how thin it should be and where certain capabilities should sit.
“Important choices remain: where the boundary of the core should sit, how interoperability should work in practice, and how migration should be managed safely,” she said.
Interoperability here means a payer can send money in one form and a payee receive it in another, at par. Cleland said respondents welcomed the idea.
On migration, she said planning can only be done once there is a clearer idea of what is being built, and so what firms will move to.
A PVDC update published on GOV.UK and updated on 2 July 2026 says the core infrastructure will continue to be regulated by the PSR, with the FCA taking over in future, and by the Bank.
It also says the UK authorities expect the operator of the core scheme to fall within the frameworks for systemically important payment systems and financial market infrastructure.
That could include recognition or designation under existing regimes run by the Bank and the PSR or FCA. The update says any such status will follow the relevant statutory and regulatory processes.
The same update says it is not a statement of policy or regulatory guidance and does not prejudge future work by HM Treasury and the authorities.
Cleland said the core will connect to the Bank’s settlement service, providing settlement in central bank money. The update says final settlement between customers of different money issuers would ultimately be in central bank money at the Bank.
There was strong support for the proposed payment journeys, she said. These include account-to-account (A2A) payments at point of sale, payments between different forms of money, instant payments using aliases, advanced delegated payments, and programmable and deferred payments.
Cleland said the core is only one layer of the ecosystem. Product and scheme arrangements, consumer protection, liability, merchant acceptance and access will all need to develop alongside it.
She said fraud and financial crime controls need to be designed in from the start. Some features will sit in layers above the core.
The consultation opened in June this year. The PVDC published its strategic outcomes for the future infrastructure on 7 November 2025.
Pay.UK continues as Payment System Operator of the current systems while the Delivery Company prepares. The Blueprint is due to pass to it in Spring 2027.
