UK Finance has reflected on what it described as a defining year for United Kingdom’s payments infrastructure ecosystem. Looking back over 2025, the team at UK Finance said that it is clear to them that this has been one of the most significant years for UK payments in “more than a decade.”
Nuala Jackson, Director Payments, UK Finance said that after years of industry discussion about the need for simplification, coherence and modernisation, this was the year when “intent turned into direction—and direction turned into action.”
The National Payments Vision (NPV), released in 2024, “set the tone.”
The UK Finance blog post also mentioned that it crystallised something the industry had “known for a long time: we cannot deliver the modern payments ecosystem the UK needs without clearer governance, greater regulatory alignment and infrastructure designed for the future, not the past.”
In November, the PVDC’s Retail Payments Strategy “provided the next layer of clarity.”
It didn’t attempt to create a delivery roadmap—”rightly so—but instead set out the outcomes and capabilities the UK must aim for.”
It gave them a shared vocabulary and a “strategic frame for the decisions ahead.”
The Chancellor’s Mansion House announcement in July, “confirming the creation of DeliveryCo, was the clearest signal yet that the UK is serious about modernising its retail payments infrastructure.”
DeliveryCo represents that resolve: a new, industry-led entity “dedicated to designing and delivering the next generation of the UK’s core retail payments infrastructure.”
Alongside DeliveryCo, the maturing role of the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB) has “been just as important.”
Bringing together regulators, government and senior industry leaders, the RPIB ensures the UK’s future payments infrastructure is “overseen with strategic discipline and shared accountability.”
The combination of the RPIB’s “oversight and DeliveryCo’s delivery role gives us something we’ve not had before: clarity about who decides what, who builds what, and how we will collectively steer the system over the next decade.”
A great deal of the work this year has focused “on defining the capabilities the future retail payments system must deliver.”
These conversations can seem “technical, but they matter because they shape real outcomes for people and businesses.”
The UK has long been a global “leader” in payments, the update noted.
Nuala Jackson of UK Finance concluded:
“With a clearer strategic framework, strengthened governance and a shared commitment to delivering the next generation of infrastructure, I believe 2025 will be seen as the year that the UK set the foundations for the decade ahead. The work is substantial—but the momentum is real.”