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This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Upgrading UK's payments infrastructure to boost GDP by $3.8bn by 2026

Upgrading the UK’s ageing payments infrastructure and increasing real-time payments adoption are forecast boost the UK economy by $3.8 billion by 2026, according to a study from ACI Worldwide, Global Data, and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr).

The UK was a world leader when it introduced its Faster Payments service more than a decade ago but is now lagging behind the likes of India and Brazil, says ACI.

The ‘New Payments Architecture’ programme, led by Pay.UK, will bring sweeping changes to the country's payments infrastructure over the next five years, delivering real time account-to-account payments.

According to the Cebr, the ‘untapped potential’ of real-time payments in the UK is enormous - the theoretical impact of all payments being real-time could boost the economy by up to $98 billion in 2026, or 2.7% annually.

However, based on 2026 real-time adoption rates (growth to 12.3% of all payments), real-time payments are predicted to unlock $3.8 billion of additional economic output - about 0.11% of formal GDP.

This is considerably less than India and Brazil, which are forecast to add $45.9 billion (1.12%) and $37.6 billion (2.08%) billion of additional GDP respectively - facilitated by strong real-time payments growth - by 2026.

Craig Ramsey, head, real-time payments, ACI Worldwide, says: "If the UK is to truly capitalise on the potential economic benefits of real-time payments over the coming years, then it must address the urgent need to modernise its ageing payments infrastructure and embrace the New Payments Architecture with open arms.

"The onus is on government and industry to work together to increase adoption, otherwise, despite the head start by the Faster Payment system, the UK risks falling even further behind the rest of the world."

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Editorial | what does this mean?

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Comments: (2)

Jeremy Light - pingNpay - London 02 September, 2022, 21:45

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Faster Payments should have received major investment five years ago - far from hindsight, this was clearly obvious at the time with real-time payments in the ascendancy and the UK a world leader - and a plan to take FPS to the next level was in place.

Instead, the combining of FPS with BACS and C&CC into Pay.UK and the NPA programme have been a huge distraction. The NPA in its original form, trying to create an undeliverable and unnecessary one-size-fits-all infrastructure lumping in batch payments with real-time payments was a big mistake that could have been avoided if innovation was allowed to take its course - as this research implies, the opportunity cost to the UK economy has been huge.

There is much work to be done to get UK payments back on track.

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 05 September, 2022, 16:13

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When I pay with credit card, I get rewards, deferred payment, fraud protection and a myriad of other benefits. Why, then, would I pay with an A2A RTP like Zelle / FPS / UPI and forfeit those benefits?

Bottomline: What's in it for the Consumer with an A2A RTP?

This question does not matter in emerging markets like India (and probably Brazil) where credit card penetration is <5%, and A2A RTP like UPI is virtually the only way to make a digital payment.

But, in advanced markets like UK and USA where credit card penetration is >100%, until A2A RTPs answer the above question, they will continue to be a solution seeking a problem.

I'm amazed at the tenacity of A2A RTP providers in advanced markets to perpetually skirt the basic issue about their value proposition and blame everything else under the sun for failing to gather traction (and for deluding themselves into believing that Open Banking will move the needle.)

While on the subject, the Year 3 FPS volume projected by a bank for itself in 2008 was 2400TPS ~ 76B transactions per year. But the actual volume achieved by all banks put together in Year 13 is only 3.8B transactions per year. (Source: Finextra).

It's not that the industry didn't invest adequately in FPS but that FPS simply doesn't have that much TAM in an advanced market like UK.