Bacs Payment Schemes Limited (Bacs), owned by leading retail payments authority Pay.UK, processed a mammoth 6.4 billion transactions worth just shy of £5 trillion across the year. That continues more than a decade of growth - back in 2006, the annual high for Bacs transactions was just 5 billion, a record which has been broken every year since.

Across August 2018 alone, 580 million payments were processed, smashing the existing record of 573 million, which had stood for almost three years (December 2015).

A new daily high of 114 million transactions was set at the end of the same month but stood only briefly, as a massive 123 million payments were processed in a single day in November, an increase of almost eight per cent.

Direct Debits soared to nearly 4.4 billion transactions - that’s more than eight Direct Debits for every UK adult - while Bacs Direct Credit, used to pay wages, salaries, pensions, and benefits, as well as supplier payments, saw values of almost £3.63 billion, the highest recorded; that compares with £2.96 billion 10 years earlier.

Paul Horlock, chief executive of Pay.UK, said:

“We are working hard to create the best retail payments industry in the world, and results like this underline the strength of the foundations on which we are building. We are committed to enabling a vibrant UK economy, and the continued growth of these established payment products can only help us in delivering that.”

In 2018, Pay.UK brought together the most important UK retail payment services, with Bacs, Faster Payments, and Cheque and Credit Clearing all now part of the same organisation.

The company is responsible for leading substantial change within the industry, with the interests of individuals, businesses, and the public sector at the heart of all new developments. Those developments range from creating rules and standards which will help protect against fraud to delivering the National Payments Architecture, a major project to improve and future-proof payment processing.