Our Head of Strategic Policy, John Mowat, recently discussed key developments in the payments landscape ahead of the Payments Regulation and Innovation Summit 2025.
Speaking on topics pertinent to the theme of this year conference’s, ‘Surviving and thriving in the new payments technological and regulatory landscape’, John offered insight into the National Payments Vision, open banking, and authorised push payment (APP) regulations.
National Payments Vision
Talking about the Government’s National Payments Vision, John expressed optimism that it will deliver innovation, competition and security in UK payments, noting the support the Vision has signalled for our technology strategy. The strategy, which involves a modular and phased approach to central infrastructure renewal, aims to overcome the impasse in technological advancement of the UK’s payment systems and unlock substantial benefits.
Highlighting the Vision’s support for a strong and effective payment systems operator, John then progressed to outline the potential of the National Payments Vision to overcome obstacles, including those around governance and innovation, that will enable our payment systems to remain as relevant as possible. He also noted that the National Payments Vision reflects Pay.UK’s own strategic priorities; that is, it is largely focused on resilience, on infrastructure renewal, on fraud, and on interbank payments in retail.
Read our response to the National Payments Vision here.
Developments in open banking
On the subject of open banking, John discussed how we are already seeing developments in this area, promoting competition, innovation and financial inclusion. To realise the full benefits of open banking, however, he noted that we need cross-sector collaboration, as well as an effective commercial model and a sound understanding of the level of consumer protection to compete with global card schemes.
Pay.UK and APP reimbursement regulations
Exploring the success of Pay.UK’s recent work to effectively mitigate and reduce the instance of APP fraud in the UK, John looked at upcoming initiatives. Last year, we prepared the industry for the expansion of our account name-checking service, Confirmation of Payee, to over 300 payment service providers, and facilitated compliance for around 900 in-scope payment providers with the Payment System’s Regulator’s October 2024 APP reimbursement regulation.
To complement this latter work, we further developed, tested and built our Reimbursement Claims Management System to support payment providers’ compliance with the policy, streamline the management of claims, and maximise operational efficiencies. We subsequently managed the transition of the majority of PSPs to the new system and are now working to transition the remainder to create a uniform approach to APP reimbursement.
In June 2023, we ran a pilot with industry partners to test the potential benefits of a fraud detection overlay service with a group of participating banks and payment service providers. Running for three months, each partner received historic Faster Payments transactional data from participating banks and payment providers under a pioneering data-sharing agreement and independently built machine learning models which identified suspicious activity and compared it to known fraudulent behaviours.
The pilot exceeded expectations with results showing an average 40% uplift in fraud detection at a 5:1 false positive rate – the equivalent of detecting £112m worth of fraud in a year. Following these encouraging results, we are now also looking to leverage our position at the centre of the ecosystem to achieve greater fraud data-sharing and, subsequently, increase fraud detection and prevention.
Listen to John’s full interview here: Interview with John Mowat: Payments Regulation and Innovation Summit 2025
