The Faster Payments Service has beaten its previous daily record, announced in December 2008, of processing nearly four million payments, to a value of nearly £730 million, Chaps Co confirms today (6 March 2009).
Of the 5 million payments processed on this new record day on the 2 March, over 4 million payments were standing orders, over three quarters of a million were immediate payments - made online or by phone - and the remaining were forward dated payments.
The main reason for this new peak is down to it being the end of the month when the vast majority of standing order payments are processed; another contributing factor is that more banks are allowing more of their customers to benefit from this new service.
The system has run extremely smoothly, since its launch in May 2008, it has processed over 125 million payments to a total value of over £46 billion. Volumes are predicted to continue rising: it is forecast that Faster Payments will help to push volumes of interbank online, phone and standing order payments from the 2007 figure of 472 million to 622 million in 2017.