Double digit growth (and decline) in the UK's payment schemes

Issue 464 | 28 March 2023

Double digit growth (and decline) in the UK's payment schemes

In this third round up of retail payments in 2023 (for the 12 months to the end of February 2023¹) we continue to see double digit growth in the volume and value of Faster Payments and double digit decline in cheque clearing.

Top three stats for this month:

• Faster Payment values have increased by 25% (12 months to January 25%).

• Cheque volumes have decreased by 14% (12 months to January decreased by 14%).

• With over 6.7 billion Bacs payments processed in the past 12 months it remains a major player processing 62% of all payment volume.

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Double digit growth (and decline) in the UK's payment schemes

Cheques

In the 12 months to the end of February 2023 we see that:

• Cheque volumes have decreased by 14% (12 months to January decreased by 14%).

• Cheque values have decreased by 8% (12 months to January decreased by 8%).

Whilst Faster Payments is experiencing double digit value growth the paper cheque continues to suffer double digit decline – over the last twelve months the volume of cheques processed has decreased by 14%.

Cheque volumes total just over 1% of the total volumes processed by Pay.UK’s schemes (Bacs, cheques and Faster Payments) and continued decline in this share is expected as actual volumes decrease and growth continues elsewhere, particularly with Faster Payments.

CHAPS

In the 12 months to the end of February 2023 we see that:

• CHAPS volumes have increased by 5% (12 months to January increased by 6%) 

This was made up of a 5% increase in retail / commercial based payments and a 5% increase in financial institution payments, compared to 6% increase and 6% increase respectively for the 12 months to January.

• CHAPS values have increased by 14% (12 months to January increased by 15%).

As the Faster Payments (FPS) participants raise their payment limits to or towards the FPS scheme limit of £1Million we will probably see a gradual reduction in CHAPS volumes although, given the value of payments initiated by financial institutions, any migration of retail / commercial payments from CHAPS to Faster Payments will not make a significant difference in the value processed.

Faster Payments

In the 12 months to the end of February 2023 we see that:

• Single Immediate Payment volumes have increased by 17% (12 months to January 17%).