The UK’s progress towards delivering the National Payments Vision

The National Payments Vision sets out the UK’s ambition for a world‑leading payments ecosystem; a system that is secure, competitive, innovative, and resilient. On 2 February 2026, David Geale (Executive Director for Payments and Digital Finance at the FCA and Managing Director of the PSR) delivered a speech at the Payments Regulation and Innovation Summit, setting out how the UK’s payments regulators are supporting this transformation.

The FCA and PSR, working closely with the Bank of England and Treasury through the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (“PVDC”), are taking a coordinated approach to maximise collective impact and drive forward innovation in payments.

Progress to date

• Open banking adoption has now reached over 16 million active users, demonstrating successful foundations on which further innovation can build, and the FCA will be publishing a roadmap for rolling out Open Finance by the end of next month.
• A regulatory framework for commercial Variable Recurring Payments is in place and first transactions are expected in the first quarter of this year.
• The APP fraud reimbursement scheme has returned 88% of claimed losses, returning £112 million to victims, with claims falling by around 15% and most resolved within five days.
• Account-to-account payments is already a priority focus area for the FCA and PSR.
• Confirmation of Payee now covers more than 99% of payments with an average of 26 checks per second.

While we await Treasury’s response to the consultation regarding the FCA and PSR consolidation, these measures demonstrate that momentum to progress the UK’s payments landscape is already underway. Crucially, the FCA will maintain its objectives around competition, innovation, and consumer protection and retain the PSR’s ‘service-users’ lens, considering the interests of all who use payments systems, not just consumers.

More to come

The FCA and PSR have set out an ambitious agenda for delivering the National Payments Vision as part of their coordinated work through the PVDC. 

A key PVDC deliverable is the forthcoming Payments Forward Plan, which will outline a sequenced programme of initiatives across retail and wholesale payments, alongside elements of digital assets, and set milestones for modernising payments regulation. This plan is expected to be published in the coming months.

Through the PVDC, the FCA has also set out its base strategy and delivered a new mechanism for infrastructure renewal.

The FCA is aware that the UK’s progress must operate beyond national borders, embracing lessons from, and working closely with, other jurisdictions.

The regulators are supporting the development of new technologies to drive delivery. Innovation already plays a significant role in regulatory engagement, with 22% of firms entering the FCA’s Innovation Pathways working on payments or open banking solutions. The aim is to support rapid technological development while safeguarding trust and market integrity. 

On crypto, the UK is positioning itself as “open for business” with a new regulatory gateway opening in September and a final consultation on crypto‑conduct rules underway, with final rules due in early summer, and the introduction of a stablecoin‑specific cohort within its Regulatory Sandbox, alongside a forthcoming stablecoin sprint to inform regulatory design.

Conclusion

The National Payments Vision is designed not only to support and modernise today’s transactions, but to accommodate increasing scale and complexity as the economy and users’ payments preferences evolve. 

With the FCA and the PSR committed to helping the UK deliver the National Payments Vision, payments firms should ensure that they stay up to date with the latest developments and engage with the regulatory change that’s on the agenda.

Written by Brandon Wong and Emily Williams