Faster Payments
A payments system fit for the 21st century
Today's customers live increasingly digital lives. They
communicate and shop online. They download music and share photos
with friends. They want the same flexibility and convenience for
banking transactions that they experience in their everyday
lives.
The Faster Payments Service (FPS) run by the CHAPS Clearing
Company, is attuned to the needs of modern consumers. It introduces
near real-time payments for low value transfers. Making a
bank-to-bank payment becomes as quick and easy as transferring
money between accounts at your own bank.
Thirteen banks and building societies have committed to Faster
Payments.
Our role has been to design, build and
run the central infrastructure to support FPS, and to manage
it for CHAPS.
Our innovative real-time payments infrastructure marks a
step-change for the UK payments industry. It meets a consumer need
for an instantaneous payment method alongside the three-day
clearing cycle.
As banks adopt FPS, the UK is moving towards a system where
near real-time payment becomes the norm.
FPS launched in May 2008. Since then financial institutions have
been upgrading their operations to handle irrevocable,
instantaneous financial transfers. It's progressively being adopted
as the new payments standard.
And Faster Payments has caught on quickly with consumers
too.
Half of regular standing orders have already migrated.
Individuals using the system are making ten million more one-off
payments every month. At peak times we're now processing up to ten
million transactions a day.