Resilience by Design: What Pay.UK Wants From UK Payments Modernisation

Quick Summary

David Crawford, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Pay.UK, says the goals set out by the authorities for the UK's future payments infrastructure look really strong, and highlights what excites him most: account-to-account journeys under one infrastructure, resilience and fraud prevention built in by design, and innovation such as programmable payments.

What should the next generation of UK payments infrastructure deliver?

Crawford points to the goals and aspirations the authorities have set out for modernising UK payments, which he says look really strong and exciting. Without going through every principle, he picks out the pieces that matter most:

• Building with future use cases in mind from the start
• Account-to-account journeys managed under one infrastructure, enabling new payment methods at the till that do not exist today in many respects
• Resilience by design
• Fraud by design, including the data sharing mechanisms needed to support it
• Innovation, including programmable payments and support for future forms of money

Why does resilience by design matter so much to Pay.UK?

Crawford says building resilience by design is really important and something Pay.UK is excited about, given its key role in keeping payments flowing all the time. End users tell Pay.UK the same thing constantly: payments have to keep flowing. People cannot risk their mortgage not being paid or their salary not arriving. He is keen to see that develop and for Pay.UK to feed into how it is done, and says building in fraud prevention by design will be equally critical.

What is Crawford personally most excited about?

The innovation that others will build. He wants to see people take the new capabilities and come up with ideas and user journeys that have not been thought of yet, solving pain points nobody knew they had. He gives his own example: splitting a bill or digitally chasing a friend for money never felt like a problem he needed solving, yet he now uses those features and thinks they are great.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Crawford's bill-splitting example is the right way to think about modernisation. The value of new infrastructure is rarely in the features specified on day one; it is in what third parties build once the rails are resilient, real-time and open to new forms of money. The job for Pay.UK is to make sure that resilience and fraud controls are part of the foundations, not retrofitted after the innovation arrives.