HM Treasury’s latest September consultation, A Streamlined Approach to Payment Systems Regulation, confirmed plans to get rid of the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) and transfer its overall functions to the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). This marks a key moment for UK payments regulation and reflects a shared, long-held conclusion: the current structure is described as being a bit “too fragmented, duplicative, and costly to support the UK’s ambitions for growth and innovation.”
UK Finance noted in a blog post that it now welcomes this direction.
Their Plan for Growth called for a proportionate, “predictable and streamlined framework—one that reduces duplication, supports innovation, and creates the conditions for sustained investment in the UK payments ecosystem.”
Consolidation is an essential first step, but “on its own is not enough.”
To meet government’s objectives for productivity, innovation and competitiveness, the UK needs a “regulatory culture that actively fosters investment, promotes commercial sustainability, and prioritises growth.”
A simpler operating environment is critical “to delivering the National Payments Vision (NPV).”
Removing duplicative reporting, “overlapping initiatives and inconsistent regulatory expectations frees up capacity for firms to invest in modernisation.”
This clarity is especially important as the UK undertakes “the most significant transformation of its retail payments infrastructure in two decades—including strengthening Faster Payments, advancing the open banking transition, enabling tokenisation, and preparing for the next generation of clearing and settlement.”
Alignment between regulators, industry and government is “now a prerequisite for meaningful progress.”
Government’s proposals build on the collaborative “structures already established through the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC) and the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB).”
These bodies bring together regulators, government and industry to coordinate delivery of the NPV and “ensure reforms are sequenced effectively.”
Their role will become even more important as the ecosystem “moves into the design and build phases of next-generation infrastructure.”
The National Payments Vision sets out a clear goal: to make the UK the world’s most “competitive and resilient payments ecosystem.”
Since publication, the Vision has moved “decisively into delivery mode,” with priorities focused on:
- Modernising the UK’s retail payments infrastructure:
- Establishing DeliveryCo (expected 2026) to deliver the next-generation clearing and settlement platform.
- Standing up a Design Authority under RPIB to steer technical, architectural and strategic decisions.
- Sequencing the design, build and migration phases for the new platform.
- Strengthening Faster Payments in the near term
- Implementing short-term enhancements to improve fraud controls, resilience, Confirmation of Payee, and certainty of fate.
- Clarifying delivery responsibilities between Pay.UK, regulators and DeliveryCo to ensure accountability and momentum.
- Advancing the open banking transition
- Developing a long-term regulatory framework that ensures reliability, consistency and commercial sustainability.
- Addressing the future of account-to-account retail payments, informed by technical feasibility work undertaken with industry and the Bank of England.
- Establishing the commercial and liability models needed to support durable, large-scale adoption.
- Enabling digital money and tokenisation
- Creating regulatory foundations for tokenised deposits and shared ledger infrastructure. Ensuring future systems are interoperable with existing rails and aligned with global developments across the G20, EU and US.
- Strengthening competition and international competitiveness
- Ensuring the UK remains an attractive destination for payments innovation and global investment.
- Building an ecosystem capable of scaling exports and supporting high-growth sectors.
- Streamlining regulation to support innovation
- Consolidating rulemaking and supervision to remove duplication and conflicting guidance.
- Ensuring new regulatory interventions are proportionate, predictable and aligned with the NPV.
- Consolidating the PSR into the FCA can provide the regulatory conditions necessary to deliver these objectives, but only if accompanied by a coherent, pro-growth regulatory culture.
Priorities for a pro-growth regulatory framework
- Eliminate duplication and legacy burdens: A streamlined regime must remove overlapping reporting requirements and outdated obligations, including those inherited from PSD2. Reforming the UK Payment Services Regulations is essential to reduce compliance friction and free up investment capacity.
- Embed commercial sustainability: Innovation will only thrive in a regulatory environment that supports commercially viable models. The NPV emphasises the need for a stable, sustainable framework that incentivises long-term investment. Policy should support cost-reflective pricing and create the conditions for payments services to be economically sustainable.
The forthcoming Payments Forward Plan is a vital opportunity “to sequence reforms, align priorities and ensure coordinated delivery across regulators, government and industry.”
Following engagement with UK Finance and members, government has taken an important “structural step.” But consolidation alone will “not deliver the streamlined, pro-growth environment the UK needs.”
By effectively eliminating duplication, embedding commercial sustainability and coordinating delivery, it may be possible to “unlock investment and innovation.”
Through collaboration and a regulatory culture that enables growth, the UK can deliver the National Payments Vision and “strengthen its global leadership in payments for the long term.”