A New Payments Scheme Launches in UK — For The First Time, A2A Transactions Get the Security Backing Needed for Success
UK banks and fintechs have launched UKPI (UK Payments Initiative); the first new payments scheme in Britain since Faster Payments in 2008. The significance of this news is not to be underestimated: while previous failure has always been down to the same point — consumers expect the same protections found in card transactions to apply to an account-to-account (A2A) payments, context. Those protections have not existed – until now.
The UKPI’s commercial model is built around an operational rulebook designed to secure A2A transactions and incentivise participation. This will further enhance A2A transactions as a mainstream, trusted alternative to card transactions, further bolstering their with widespread adoption.
UKPI picks up where Open Banking left off.
Open Banking built the rails for A2A transactions but did not build the rules. As a result, adoption stayed narrow and remains confined to one-off payments, while the categories that drive real volume (subscriptions, recurring bills, utility payments) have yet to shift away from cards.
Despite that, in the UK alone, Open Banking has reached 15 million active users processing 22.1 million payments monthly.1 The appetite and infrastructure are there, but trust is needed to expand into everyday spending.
Now, however, UKPI has developed a shared rulebook governing how A2A payments operate, which covers liability, dispute resolution, and responsibility. With global A2A transactions projected to surge from 60 billion in 2024 to 186 billion by 2029, a 209% increase, a framework built on top of existing rails is the missing piece Open Banking never solved. If UKPI succeeds, it could become the blueprint for Open Banking at scale globally.2
ERIS SAYS: UKPI is building what the EU has tried and failed to build for years. Multi-jurisdiction coordination has been the sticking point for every European equivalent so far, with WERO’s limited adoption to date the most recent example of this complexity. As we’ve seen in the creation of cross-border links between real-time payments schemes in South-East Asia, individual markets are simply able to move faster than supra-national blocs.
UKPI’s explicit focus on replicating the consumer protections that card networks have spent decades building is the critical piece. The biggest barrier to A2A adoption among everyday consumers has always been the absence of those protections. Outside the slower mechanics of EU-wide coordination, the UK has a genuine opportunity to build something functional that changes how A2A payments are trusted and used.
The obvious trade-off is scale.
A payments scheme is only as valuable as its network, and a smaller domestic market means a smaller network to start with. Without wide adoption, even a well-designed scheme has limited usefulness.
UKPI is a framework and a vehicle, the harder work of winning consumer trust and merchant adoption still lies ahead. Even so, it represents the first real attempt at building genuine security into A2A payments and shows how UK payments infrastructure is moving with real intent.
We may finally see an instant payments system reach a scale not yet matched in either Europe or North America.