The UK is planning to upgrade its instant payment system to include a modern ISO 20022-compliant architecture.
According to PYMNTS, known as the New Payment Architecture, the initital plan is to upgrade the existing Faster Payments real-time rails, with an option to include the older Bacs system in the future.
The publication said that upgrade is necessary as although the FPS system with one the first nationwide, ‘the world has moved on since then and standards have evolved’.
ISO 20022 has emerged as one of the preferred financial messaging standard deployed by the most modern payment systems worldwide. As an example, SWIFT and the Eurosystem are expected to adopt the new standard in March this year.
ISO 20022 compliance is a key aspect of the payment modernization agenda. Thanks to the enhanced data that can be embedded in ISO 20022 messages, the opportunities to build additional services on top of the infrastructure layer are multiplied.
Pay UK, the company that is responsible for managing the UK’s major retail payment systems, has stated that it intends for the NPA to be less cumbersome to use and connect to than existing infrastructures.
In a press release outlining its approach to the NPA rulebook, which it is currently writing, Pay UK said that “our focus for the NPA rulebook is to make it easy to use and search.”
The company said it wants the rulebook to be a “lightweight document, ideally not as content-heavy as the current Faster Payment System rulebook, which (like the Bacs documentation) has become large and unwieldy over time.”
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