Innovate Finance is calling for the UK to be the world leader in digital wallet payments, with a digital payments ecosystem that supports and enables a diversity of payment methods and providers, underpinned by competition where the consumer has choice and control and can easily use different payment systems, methods and providers with ease and with confidence in an equivalent level of consumer protection.
The paper outlines our Vision statement for FinTech in payments:
A world leading innovative payment ecosystem which promotes competition through enabling a wide range of interoperable payment options for individuals and businesses and that drives economic growth and productivity, utilising new technologies to ensure world leading payment experiences that are adaptable to future innovations.
This would mean that:
- Consumers can choose to use any digital payment method, easily and with confidence
- Merchants can receive payment by any payment method
- Devices that host wallets should enable and allow fair access for a wide range of competing digital payment methods
To support the government’s thinking, Innovate Finance has produced the ‘National Payments Vision for FinTech’, which includes specific recommendations relating to how the NPV should support the FinTech sector as a key part of the payments ecosystem, building on the new innovation and competition that FinTech has added to the payment landscape over the last decade in the UK.
Over the last 15 years, FinTech companies have become an integral element of payment value chains in the UK. Our members operate at the consumer-facing ‘front end’ of these chains and also provide vital underlying infrastructure that facilitates the movement of money.
Contactless payments, initiated by cards, mobile phones and watches accounted for almost a third of all payments in 2021. Buy Now, Pay Later services are used by a fifth of all people. 1,200 companies in the UK operate in digital payments, employing over 265,000 people and have a combined turnover of £17.6 billion. They have attracted over £20 billion of investment funding, and are estimated to have been growing (by number of employees) at 46% per year.
Innovate Finance welcomes HM Treasury’s commitment to producing a National Payments Vision (NPV) for the UK. One of our main suggestions in our response to Joe Garner’s Future of Payments Review in 2023 was for a holistic strategy for UK retail payments.
Our paper examines FinTech’s role in the payments landscape, how the government can implement, deliver and review the Vision’s progress, and key aims that the NPV should include to support the FinTech sector. This includes; building Account to Account payment capabilities, delivery of the National Payments Architecture, and expanding international interoperability of payments systems that would support the growth of the payment sector.
You can read Innovate Finance’s paper, here
1 Innovate Finance: Future of Payments Review 2023, Innovate Finance Submission.
