Last updated: 14/10/2025
The New Payments Architecture (NPA) work has been renamed the Interbank Infrastructure Renewal (IIR). This change follows the cancellation of the NPA procurement and the National Payments Vision’s call for a more agile and flexible approach to deliver the UK's infrastructure needs.
Our role remains to closely monitor Pay.UK as they focus on the critical operation and optimisation of the current interbank systems, ensuring their resilience and ability to serve today’s ecosystem. We are also working to ensure that there is a smooth transition to next-generation infrastructure in the future.
We will continue to take action where appropriate to ensure outcomes that support our statutory objectives to promote competition, innovation and the interests of service users.
History of the NPA
In 2015, we set up the cross-industry Payments Strategy Forum to identify, prioritise and help to deliver initiatives where it is necessary for the payments industry to work together to promote collaborative innovation.
The Forum published recommendations which included consolidating the operators of Bacs, Cheque and Credit (C&C), and Faster Payments (FPS). In addition, the strategy proposed the creation of the NPA to replace the architecture used for today’s UK retail interbank payment systems.
It envisaged the clearing and settlement of payments taking place over a single purpose-built central infrastructure rather than the separate infrastructure that is currently used.
We then set up the Payment System Operator Delivery Group (PSODG) with the Bank of England in October 2016 to consider key issues relating to the potential consolidation.
The PSODG published a report in May 2017 setting out its recommendations on the key characteristics of a proposed New Payment System Operator (NPSO), with the NPA as one of its core deliverables.
In October 2018, Pay.UK became the operator.
Our role
The UK led the world on developing the infrastructure to enable faster payments. We now need to go further and upgrade these systems as soon as possible so that we don’t fall behind. We will work with the Bank of England to clarify and refresh the requirements for the UK’s retail infrastructure, including the governance arrangements needed to deliver this.
As the National Payments Vision emphasises, it is essential that the infrastructure of the future supports market innovation and competition. In light of the Vision’s direction on payments infrastructure, we consulted on changing our obligations on Pay.UK to the NPA.
A history of some of the key action we have taken over recent years can be found below.
August
We decided to revoke Specific Direction 2 and 2a, following our consultation in May 2025.
Through the National Payments Vision (NPV), the Government, tasked the PSR and the Bank of England to reassess the requirements for retail payments infrastructure, and strengthen the governance and funding arrangements needed to deliver this. In this context, the revocation of SD2 ensures that there is space and flexibility for the NPV outcomes to materialise unencumbered by legal obligations in SD2.
May
We decided to revoke Specific Direction 3 and 3a, following our consultation in 2024.
- Through the National Payments Vision (NPV), the Government, tasked the PSR and the Bank of England to reassess the requirements for retail payments infrastructure, and strengthen the governance and funding arrangements needed to deliver this. The decision to revoke SD3 provides the necessary space and certainty for that work to progress, with recommendations to the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC).
- We also published a consultation on revoking Specific Direction 2 and 2a.
December
We published a consultation on making changes to Specific Direction 3. These changes included:
- Removing the current SD3 deadline
- Strengthening oversight
- Enhancing its Regulatory Framework
April
We published our letter to Pay.UK, asking them to to provide us with information that we will use to inform our approach to investment in the current FPS system.
September
In September 2023, the PSR Board agreed that Pay.UK has provided sufficient assurance at this stage to continue with its NPA programme plans.
We published our letter to Pay.UK setting out the result of the latest assurance point.
March
In March 2023, we confirmed our non-objection to Pay.UK’s procurement of ‘additional functionality’ in its NPA Central Infrastructure Services.
We have considered Pay.UK’s proposals and have decided not to object to the inclusion of the additional functionality.
(see our Policy Statement CP21/8, our revised Specific Direction 3)
January
SDs 2a and 3a came into force on 1 January 2022.
December
We set out our decision on the changes we made to SDs 2 and 3 following our consultation and gave SDs 2a and 3a to Pay.UK.
We published our regulatory framework for the NPA CIS which sets out requirements on both Pay.UK and a CIS provider that will address risks to competition and innovation in the NPA ecosystem arising from the behaviour of a provider appointed to deliver CIS. We also published illustrative directions to show how the framework could be implemented.
July
We published a paper setting out our decisions for reducing risks to NPA delivery.
We decided that Pay.UK should phase the development of the NPA by narrowing the scope of the NPA central infrastructure services (CIS) contract. Pay.UK must secure this contract through a competitive tender.
To implement these decisions, we consulted on giving directions – Specific Directions (SDs) 2a and 3a – varying SDs 2 and 3.
February
We published a consultation on delivery and regulation of the NPA setting out:
- options for reducing risks to the successful delivery of the NPA, which we considered to be unacceptably high
- proposals to mitigate risks to competition and innovation relating to when the NPA is operational
January
We issued a call for input asking for stakeholders’ views on issues that could affect competition and innovation in the NPA. This followed our work setting out our expectations and thinking about the development of the NPA, which we summarised in open letters to Pay.UK in 2018 and 2019. These covered risk, competition, innovation, rules and standards, governance and decision-making, and stakeholder engagement.