Tracking the UK's payment schemes: The essential guide

Issue 476 | 2 May 2023

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

In this fourth round up of retail payments in 2023¹, for the 12 months to the end of March 2023, we continue to see double digit growth in the volume and value of Faster payments and double digit decline in paper clearing.

Additionally, the UK’s bulk clearing scheme (Bacs) value has grown by 3% and RTGS (CHAPS) volume at 5%.

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Top three stats for this month

The values processed by the UK’s key payment systems are increasing:

• Single Immediate Payment values have increased by 29% (12 months to February 29%).

• CHAPS values have increased by 13% (12 months to February increased by 14%).

• Bacs Direct Debit values have increased by 9% (12 months to February increased by 9%).

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Payment scheme volume and values (12 months to end of March 2023)

Source: Pay.UK

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Faster Payments

In the 12 months to the end of March 2023 :

• Single Immediate Payment volumes have increased by 18% (12 months to February 17%)

• Total Faster Payment volumes have increased by 14% (12 months to February 14%)

• Single Immediate Payment values have increased by 29% (12 months to February 29%)

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

The meteoric rise in Faster Payments volumes continues to be bolstered by a switch from analogue to digital payments and the growing importance of Open Banking initiated Account to Account (A2A) payments.

The widespread use of Faster Payments is a digital payment habit that will be here to stay, reinforced as a result of the pandemic but with volumes and values continuing to increase month on month.

Although the trajectory in the increase in the volume of payments has flattened since the pandemic, the overall increase year on year is still significant and looks set to continue for some while to come.

The future is certainly bright for Faster Payments – continued growth from Open Banking A2A payments and payments initiated by overlay services such as Request to Pay and Variable Recurring payments is certainly on the agenda. The growth is also likely to be bolstered through the introduction of new Faster Payment types (or flavours) as part of version 1.0 of the planned New Payments Architecture and, perhaps, through a future planned migration of Bacs Direct Credit payments into the NPA.

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Bacs Direct Debit and Direct Credit

In the 12 months to the end of March 2023:

• Bacs Direct Credit volumes have increased by 6% (12 months to February increased by 4%)

• Bacs Direct Debit volumes have increased by 2% (12 months to February increased by 2%)

• Total Bacs volumes have increased by 3% (12 months to February increased by 3%)

• Bacs Direct Credit values have increased by 5% (12 months to February increased by 6%)

• Bacs Direct Debit values have increased by 9% (12 months to February increased by 9%)

• Total Bacs values have increased by 6% (12 months to February increased by 7%).

Notwithstanding the continued double digit growth in Faster Payments we still see Bacs Direct Credit growth of 6% – with just over 2Billion ‘push’ payments processed via the Bacs schemes over the last twelve months.