Against that backdrop, the Bank of England has launched a consultation through the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB) on what a next-generation payments architecture for the UK should look like.

The consultation forms part of the broader National Payments Vision and the work of the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC). It asks a fundamental question: what sort of payments infrastructure will Britain need in the decades ahead?

The RPIB, chaired by the Bank of England, brings together banks, payment service providers, fintechs, merchants, and other industry participants, with a particular focus on the needs of consumers and businesses.

The consultation closes on 11 September 2026.

At its heart, the consultation is about ensuring that Britain's payments infrastructure remains fit for purpose. The Bank of England and industry stakeholders are considering how a future platform can support a growing digital economy while maintaining the trust, resilience, and security on which payments depend.
The ambition is to create an infrastructure that is faster, more flexible, and better able to accommodate innovation, while continuing to serve households and businesses reliably and safely. Just as importantly, it is intended to provide a foundation that can adapt to technological change rather than respond to it after the fact.

Britain's payments landscape has evolved significantly over recent decades. What was once a relatively straightforward system now supports a far broader range of payment methods, providers, and customer expectations. At the same time, technology is advancing rapidly, competition is increasing and resilience is becoming ever more important.

The RPIB's vision is to establish a modern platform capable of supporting future innovation while maintaining interoperability across the market. Common standards, open access and robust security will be central to that objective.

The new infrastructure would seek to make payments simpler and more intuitive. Consumers could, for example, make instant payments using an alias rather than sharing account details. It is also intended to reduce friction in cross-border payments, an area that remains more complex and costly than many domestic transactions.
 

One of the most interesting ideas within the consultation is the concept of a "multi-money ecosystem". In essence, this is a payments environment that can support different forms of money operating alongside one another.

Today, most payments rely on commercial bank deposits or electronic money. In future, regulated stablecoins and potentially a digital pound could become part of the mix. A modern payments infrastructure would need to enable these various forms of money to coexist and interact seamlessly.

The long-term objective is to give consumers and businesses greater choice, allowing them to move value easily and securely regardless of the underlying form of money being used.

And what are programmable payments?

Account-to-account payments enable money to move directly from a customer's bank account to a merchant's account, without relying on card networks. The proposed infrastructure would support such payments both online and at the physical point of sale.

For consumers, that could mean a faster and more seamless payment experience. For merchants, it offers the prospect of lower acceptance costs and greater choice in how they receive payments.

The consultation also explores how payments are settled between financial institutions. Faster settlement can improve efficiency but requires participants to hold additional liquidity. Striking the right balance between speed, cost and resilience will be an important consideration.

Programmable payments represent another area of growing interest. These allow payments to be executed automatically when predefined conditions are met. A customer might instruct funds to be released only after a service has been delivered, for example. Often associated with smart-contract technology, programmable payments have the potential to create new business models and more automated financial processes. Any future infrastructure will need to support such capabilities securely and at scale.

Small businesses could be among the biggest beneficiaries.

Greater adoption of account-to-account payments has the potential to reduce payment acceptance costs by providing alternatives to traditional card-based transactions. Faster settlement would also improve cash flow by allowing businesses to access funds more quickly.

More broadly, a more modern payments infrastructure should lower barriers to innovation, enabling new services and solutions that can help smaller firms compete more effectively.
 

Trust is fundamental to any payments system, and fraud prevention is a key consideration within the consultation.

The RPIB is examining how future infrastructure can include stronger safeguards against financial crime, including clearer rules governing payments that move between different providers. It is also considering controls designed to limit suspicious automated activity and improve recovery processes when things go wrong.

The goal is not simply to move money faster, but to ensure that speed is matched by strong consumer protection and operational resilience.
 

The consultation marks the beginning rather than the end of the process. The immediate priority is to gather industry feedback and refine the high-level design.

Once there is agreement on the future architecture, responsibility would move to delivery and implementation. Given the scale and complexity of payments infrastructure, full deployment is likely to take several years.

That may seem like a long time. But payments networks are among the most important pieces of national infrastructure. The challenge is not simply building for today's needs but creating a platform capable of supporting the UK's economy for decades to come.
 

NatWest innovates around payments by developing customer-led solutions that make payments faster, simpler, safer, and more transparent. Our work spans real-time payments, open banking, account-to-account payments, cross-border payments, payment data, digital assets, tokenised deposits, programmable payments, and emerging forms of digital money. We focus on innovation that delivers measurable benefits for customers, businesses, and the wider economy.

Read more about our payments insights here and look out for us at Sibos.