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Pay.UK’s work on Certainty of Fate to support A2A retail transactions

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  • Pay.UK
  • November 27, 2025

In line with the National Payments Vision, Pay.UK is committed to enhancing the UK’s payment systems to deliver greater resilience, innovation, and benefits for end users. Working closely with government, regulators, and the wider industry, we have been progressing five priority enhancements set by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee. One of these key enhancements is Certainty of Fate (CoF) – a vital capability designed to strengthen confidence in account-to-account (A2A) retail transactions.
Certainty of Fate means giving both the payer and the payee confidence about the outcome of a payment – whether it has succeeded or failed – and doing so quickly. Timely confirmation is essential to ensure trust and a smooth experience in A2A transactions. It is a topic with significant industry and regulatory focus, as confidence in payment outcomes is essential for driving the growth of A2A retail transactions across a broad range of use cases.
We are pleased to share a new paper that outlines the work Pay.UK has undertaken throughout 2025 to explore how Certainty of Fate could be delivered. This paper summarises.

  • What Certainty of Fate is and why it is important
  • What is preventing Certainty of Fate today
  • How these issues can be addressed – by Pay.UK, OBL and by any future A2A scheme
  • Pay.UK’s next steps – both in engaging on this work and progressing its proposed FPS rule clarification.

This work has been shaped through close engagement with Payment Service Providers (PSPs), Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs), Open Banking Limited (OBL), and trade associations, and we extend our thanks to all who contributed.
You can read the full paper here.
We encourage anyone with views on this topic to get in touch before the end of January 2026.
If you would like to engage further on this topic, please contact us at payukindustryengagement@wearepay.uk.

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