Pay.UK reaches exciting milestone

The New Payments Architecture (NPA) will unlock significant benefits for many businesses and personal customers within the UK, helping transform the way they control their professional and personal transactions, and creating a wealth of innovation opportunities.

The adoption of the ISO 20022 standard, not just within the UK but globally, will have a seismic and profound impact on the data carrying capability of payment systems, changing the way we can fundamentally make payments and transfer financial information. The standard allows for significantly enhanced data exchange; richer information through an increased quality and quantity of data will lead to improved benefits and substantial opportunities for innovation in the payments’ ecosystem and beyond – from banks and financial institutions to businesses and personal customers.

To push forward and lead this step-change, Pay.UK has today (5 July 2021) published its first set of technical materials for those organisations implementing ISO 20022 and moving to the Next Generation Standard for UK retail payments. These standards pave the way for richer and more meaningful exchanges of information within UK payments.

This documentation is the first ‘collection’ of standards materials we have produced for industry and shows what this transformative change for everyone will be built upon. Whilst only in draft form and not for implementation at this stage, the publication allows organisations, where appropriate, to start undertaking any necessary impact assessments.

For relevant organisations, the materials are available for download through our Pay.UK standards portal, Standards Source, where access can be obtained by contacting standards@wearepay.uk.

James Whittle, the director of Pay.UK’s Standards Authority, said: “Richer information exchange in payments is coming to the UK through the Next Generation Standard – ISO 20022 – and it will change the face of retail payments as we know it.

This standard allows for enhanced data exchange that will lead to improved benefits for the entire payments ecosystem – from banks and financial institutions to businesses and personal customers. I’m thrilled to be able to publish the standard today and see this as the next step along the road to unlocking the potential benefits that the UK economy needs for payments.

There has been strong industry support for us on this and we have worked with the Bank of England throughout to ensure appropriate alignment between the standards for high-value and retail payments. Our participation in international standards fora also safeguards that our development of this Next Generation Standard does not conflict with existing implementations of ISO 20022, ensuring international interoperability.”