A dozen things about Pay.UK
Issue 489 | 20 May 2023
A dozen things about Pay.UK
You’ll find a dozen things about Pay.UK (the operator of Bacs, Faster Payments and the cheque clearing system) covering the first five months of 2023 in this edition of Payments:Unpacked Extra!
Mike's career at the heart of the UK's payments infrastructure and his wide perspective on the evolution of the space are invaluable to those of us developing strategies in the field.
Dave Birch, In the future, everyone will be famous for 15Mb
Pay.UK on UK Finance 2023 Fraud Report
Fraudsters move fast and adapt quickly, coming up with novel methods and using technology to their advantage. This is reflected in the steep rise of online scams, which are one of the most prevalent crimes in the UK, with impersonation scams, where fraudsters pretend to be a friend, family member or a trusted organisation, being one of the most common methods this year. We are working with the payments industry to develop tools to detect and prevent this type of fraud.
Kate Frankish, Chief Business Development Officer and Anti-fraud lead at Pay.UK
More:
With the steep rise of online scams, which are one of the most prevalent crimes in the UK thwart the fraudster with Request to Pay.
Confirmation of Payee: the service continues to expand
As the amount of Confirmation of Payee (CoP) participants grows in light of Specific Direction 17 (SD17) from the Payment Systems Regulator, CoP is developing faster than ever to continue to have a positive impact on the fight against fraud.
Pay.UK is developing CoP to enable different types of organisations to offer the service to their customers, such as PSPs in the crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, or building societies and government departments.
CoP is continuing its growth year on year, with over 64 organisations offering the service and 25 going through the onboarding process.
More
Current Account Switch Service reaches 9 million switches milestone
The latest Current Account Switch Service Dashboard reveals that between January and March 2023, 341,075 switches took place, a figure that is over 70% higher than the same period last year.
The past 12 months (1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023) saw over 1 million switches take place through the Service.
As the Current Account Switch Service approaches its tenth anniversary the Service has now facilitated 9.1 million switches since launch and successfully redirected 134.4 million payments.
End-user switching data, which is three months in arrears, showed that Nationwide had the highest net switching gains between October and December 2022, followed by NatWest, Starling Bank, and Triodos Bank.
More:
Current Account Switch Service reaches 9 million switches milestone.
Think you know about Current Account Switching? Think again.
Seven performance facts about the UK's current account switching service.
Self-Validation Testing: the launch of customer collaboration on the NPA
Given that the significance of the New Payments Architecture (NPA), Pay.UK have designed a testing strategy to ensure that the NPA framework can be validated across the entire ecosystem.
Pay.UK has launched the first phase of this strategy, Self-Validation Testing (SVT), that ensures customer readiness for the ISO 20022 messaging standard.
An NPA “launch moment”
The SVT allows customers to connect to a technical representation of the NPA for the very first time and test those ISO 20022 messages, both as a sending and receiving organisation. It represents a ‘launch moment’ for the programme as customers begin their transformation from the existing Faster Payment System to the data-rich NPA product types.
David Morris, Pay.UK’s Chief Technology Officer.
More
Paym mobile payments service closes
Pay.UK announced on the 7th March that Paym, the mobile payments service permanently closed.
A collective decision to close the service was made in September 2022 by Pay.UK and the fifteen UK banks and building societies who operated Paym. That decision was made in response to falling numbers of transactions and the lack of customers signing up to become new users.
More
How will ISO 20022 enhanced data benefit UK payments
Migration to the ISO 20022 messaging standard is one of the most significant transformations to the financial industry in recent times. A technical advancement that will revolutionise the entire payments system, it is set to replace existing payment standards in more than 50 countries and account for an estimated 80% of high-value payments by volume within five years.
Currently in CHAPS, the payment message can only hold two unstructured free text fields. Whether it’s an invoice reference, tax information or simply the payee’s name and address, it all has to fit into this small allowance of space, which can be fraught with data quality challenges, particularly for more complex cross-border payments.
Mark Streather, Bank of England
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Payments:Unpacked to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.