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.