EXCLUSIVE: "Rules Britannia!: The Great Payments Renewal" -  David Crawford, Pay.UK in 'Discover Sibos'

As the key utility operator, Pay.UK must continue to keep systems running safely and efficiently while the country redesigns its payments infrastructure. David Crawford considers some of the difficult questions the future poses

Payments infrastructure is at its most successful when nobody notices it. Salaries arrive, bills are collected and money moves between accounts in seconds, with the complex machinery underpinning those transactions largely invisible to the people and businesses relying on it.

At the heart of that machinery in the United Kingdom sits Pay.UK. As the operator of the nation’s core retail interbank payment systems – including Faster Payments, Bacs and the Image Clearing System – the organisation occupies a critical position in one of the world’s most sophisticated payments markets.

But its remit stretches beyond keeping the rails running. Pay.UK also operates services designed to help prevent fraud, including Confirmation of Payee, which now covers more than 99 per cent of organisations initiating Faster Payments in the UK and helps people check they are sending money to the intended recipient.

According to recent UK Finance figures, UK losses from authorised push payment fraud reached £576.4million in 2025, up 19 per cent year-on-year, illustrating the reality that faster, more seamless payments must be accompanied by advances in security. That’s top of mind as Britain embarks on a major overhaul of its payments landscape. The government’s National Payments Vision and 2026 Payments Forward Plan have placed innovation, competition and security at the centre of the agenda, while the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board is helping shape the next generation of UK retail payments.

For Pay.UK, that creates a balancing act: maintaining the resilience and security of systems used across the economy today while preparing for what comes next. We spoke to Pay.UK’s Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, David Crawford, about modernising Britain’s payments infrastructure, tackling fraud, fostering innovation and what the next chapter of UK payments could look like.

DISCOVER SIBOS MAGAZINE AI is rapidly changing financial services. What role could it play in helping Pay.UK make the payments system more resilient and identify financial crime before it happens?

DAVID CRAWFORD First and foremost, given our priority to keep payments flowing no matter what, I think about resilience. It’s certainly something we take huge pride in – maintaining that resilient environment not just within Pay.UK, but across the entire ecosystem.

So, it’s about using AI to help us be even more resilient than we already are; by helping us scan the environment every minute of every day for signals and threats. Through analysing those signals, we could detect and prevent incidents before they even happen. And if we can’t prevent something, AI can help us scenario-plan virtually instantly, so that we already have the playbooks and mechanisms to respond the next time. Then there’s the data within payments themselves. 

How and should we start including information about whether a payment originated from AI, an agent or a human? And what would that mean for how we authenticate or authorise that payment? 

DSM Your previous answer touches on agentic commerce, which could fundamentally change not only who initiates payments, but also how frequently transactions take place. Are today’s payment rails and authentication systems ready for AI agents?

DC You mean, do we have the digital motorways to carry the traffic we expect to see over the next three to five years from agentic commerce? I think the answer is broadly yes. Although we’re not seeing that huge increase in volume right now, we have to be ready for it.

Consumers probably won’t spend much more money, but what they do spend could become increasingly fragmented. Instead of doing a weekly food shop, for example, your fridge might start ordering things itself. We’re going to see more payments as a result. Your other question is really about whether we need to change the rules of the road. If a payment was made by an agent, what does that mean for authorisation, and what does it mean for liability? If an agent sends your life savings to a scammer, who’s liable? Is it you because you authorised the agent to act for you, or is it the AI company hosting that agent? 

These are really difficult questions that we’re going to have to face. At the same time, we’re excited about capabilities such as programmable payments, programmable money and the linkage between new forms of money and new payments infrastructure. I can’t tell you what all those user journeys will look like, because I don’t think they’ve been invented yet!

DSM There are decades of accumulated rules, standards and obligations underpinning payment schemes. How can Pay.UK strip away that complexity and make payments genuinely interoperable?

DC Just about every scheme in the world has evolved over time and ended up with rulebooks that can contain thousands of obligations and rules. So, when we think about cross-border, cross-scheme and cross-forms of money, enabling all of those to operate seamlessly is going to be a huge challenge.

We’ve spent a lot of intellectual capital and energy looking at how we solve that problem. We’ve taken our own rulebooks, extracted the rules, deduplicated and simplified them, and we want to take that to the nth degree. We don’t know what good looks like yet. Is it half the number of rules we have today? Is it a tenth? But we want to get down to the bare minimum because that makes it much easier to establish the conditions for seamless transfers of value between countries, schemes and forms of money.\

We want to go further and move away from recording these things in documents, too. We want to digitise the rulebook so, as an operator, you could ask ‘Which rules matter for me when onboarding?’, ‘Which matter for cross-border payments?’, ‘If I take a certain action, does that satisfy those rules?’. The complexity exists because, as you say, these systems have evolved over many years. Bacs, for example, is almost 60 years old. As we’ve added things to keep payments safe, resilient and efficient, we’ve also built in complexity. We need to simplify that for everyone.

DSM Real-time, AI-driven payments also mean threats can emerge and spread at unprecedented speed. Does protecting the next generation of payments require the industry to become much more collaborative with its data?

DC Yes. Moving towards real-time environments fuelled by AI means we can no longer operate in our individual silos. We need to collaborate, share information and share our understanding of threats – right down to sharing data with each other. We are already exploring the Enhanced Data Exchange with our Pay.UK participants. It’s a little like Confirmation of Payee, which we run, and it addresses how we can share additional information that helps us detect and prevent fraud before it happens.

There’s a dual threat and opportunity that AI affords everyone – us, our participants and consumers. We’re already seeing AI being used across the ecosystem to protect against fraud, whether that’s by banks, ourselves or consumers using apps that can help keep them safe. But we have to be alive to the fact that those same tools can be used against us. That means thinking about how we build our defences to manage that threat.

Pay.UK cannot simply participate in that discussion. There are times when we really have to lead it – bring people together and create the conditions that allow the industry to solve these problems collectively.

DSM The UK now has an opportunity to build its next generation of payments infrastructure around needs that barely existed when today’s systems were created. What will modernisation actually change for consumers, merchants and businesses?

DC Building resilience by design is really important. But how we build fraud prevention in by design is going to be critical. Modern infrastructure can take user journeys we’ve already started developing – things such as account-to-account payments – and make them seamless, digital and straightforward, including bringing account-to-account payments to the physical checkout.

It will also offer users a 24/7 capability. Being able to undertake payments without cut-offs being imposed at various times of day will be really important. Then there are new capabilities such as programmable payments and money. I think those will unlock innovation for various parties – not just ourselves and banks, but also third and fourth parties that can create new experiences for end users.

That’s what I’m personally most excited about: seeing people grab those capabilities and develop ideas and innovations that we haven’t even thought about today. If I go back 10 or 15 years, I don’t think anybody envisaged QR codes, splitting a bill digitally or sending somebody a request to pay you £10 for something you bought yesterday. 
People innovated on the existing infrastructure to make those things possible. I think the next generation of innovation is going to be really exciting – we just don’t know yet exactly what it will bring.