We are pleased to release our Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024, highlighting our achievements and financial performance over the year, and the progress against our strategic priorities.
Read the full report here.
Key achievements in 2024
Next Generation Infrastructure programme and the National Payments Vision
- We welcomed the publication of the National Payments Vision, as well as its proposals for regulatory alignment and the Payments Vision Delivery Committee, and are supportive of its three pillars – innovation, competition and security.
- Following the cancellation of the New Payments Architecture (NPA), we led work with our customers to develop an alternative technology strategy to maintain and enhance our central infrastructure.
- We engaged with the authorities to demonstrate how key elements of the National Payments Vision can be enabled through our central infrastructure, our access requirements, our rules and standards, or new services.
- We initiated our Next Generation Infrastructure programme, comprising an informed technology strategy, designed to support easier access of new products and services that are created through innovation in the ecosystem.
- We submitted proposals to extend the provision of existing infrastructure, deliver critical enhancements, and develop plans for future infrastructure.
- We supported customer change activities to enable access and ongoing use of our payment systems.
Risk and assurance
- We achieved our risk maturity target in 2024 through reinforcing risk management procedures, strengthening skills and capabilities of our second line of defence risk team, and through having embedded a first line of defence risk management and Operational Resilience team.
- We implemented a Governance, Risk and Compliance tool to facilitate the end-to-end risk management processes and manage internal and external risks.
- We progressed our industry forum, the Payment Industry Resilience Forum (PIRF), and completed valuable scenario testing with the industry on a prolonged Bacs outage.
- We evolved our operational resilience through a series of scenario tests.
- We obtained ISO 27001 re-certification in August 2024, serving as a testament to an effective Information Security Management System.
Payment operations
- We continued to successfully manage the platforms that comprise our national payments infrastructure, delivering robust and resilient operations throughout the year.
- We delivered operational availability at more than 99.9% and processed 12 billion retail payments (2023: 11.4 billion) to a value of just over £10.2 trillion (2023: 9.5 trillion).
- We saw a new daily transaction record of 138.5 million Bacs items on 29 November, meanwhile the FPS processed a record total annual transaction volume of 5.1 billion (2023: 4.5 billion), marking the first year that the service crossed the 5 billion transaction threshold.
- We also saw monthly records set on three separate occasions, with 461 million FPS payments made in December.
- By the end of 2024, the total number of directly connected customers was 46 for FPS, 32 for Bacs and 20 for ICS.
- We saw progress across our broader services, with 1.2 million customers and small businesses using our Current Account Switch Service.
Fraud
- We collaborated extensively with the industry and our regulators and made significant progress within our dedicated Fraud programme.
- We successfully expanded our award-winning, account name-checking service, Confirmation of Payee, to reduce misdirected payments and certain types of push payment fraud, supporting over 300 payment service providers (PSPs) in implementing the service, and further developing a new aggregator model to facilitate expansion.
- The service reached the 2 billion checks milestone in 2024 and we are now seeing an average of over 2 million Confirmation of Payee checks every day.
- We worked with the industry to support the implementation of the new Authorised Push Payment (APP) reimbursement policy which created a minimum compensation standard.
- We developed our Reimbursement Claims Management System (RCMS) to support industry compliance with the new policy.
Organisation and people
- We continued to invest in the development of our colleagues through a range of training and development programmes and received pleasing colleague engagement survey results with a 85% response rate and a 78% engagement score.
- Our appointments to the Pay.UK Board and Executive team over the course of the year strengthened expertise and capability of our leadership.
Looking ahead
We are pleased with the progress we made in each of these key focus areas, bolstered by effective engagement and collaboration with our regulators and the industry.
As we look to 2025, we will continue to work collaboratively with our regulators and the wider industry to progress our key focus areas – Next Generation Infrastructure programme, the National Payments Vision, risk, assurance and payment operations, people and culture – to ensure that we continue to drive the best possible outcome for end users, customers, the Government, and the UK economy.
David Pitt, Chief Executive Officer, Pay.UK, said: “We made sound progress in 2024, including transforming the way we engage and collaborate with our customers and wider stakeholders to deliver benefit for people and businesses in the UK. This included work on the National Payments Vision, on extending the provision of existing infrastructure, on delivering critical enhancements, and on our work to reduce fraud.
“From our unique position at the centre of the UK’s payments ecosystem, we look forward to continuing our partnership with the industry, the Government and our regulators. We remain focused on building on this substantial work to ensure that our systems and services remain robust, resilient, and secure in an evolving landscape.”
