Faster Payments

Faster Payments made the UK an early answer to a question most countries only faced a decade later: why should an electronic payment take days? Live since 2008, the Faster Payment System moves money between UK accounts within seconds, continuously, with no weekend closures and no cut-off times visible to the user. It carried about 5.1 billion payments worth £4.2 trillion in 2024, and volumes keep climbing: Q4 2025 alone saw 1.5 billion payments worth nearly £1.3 trillion, up 8.9% year over year.

The design detail worth knowing is that speed and settlement are separated. The recipient’s bank credits the funds in seconds and takes on the exposure; the banks then settle their net obligations in cycles across accounts at the Bank of England, a deferred net settlement model backstopped by prefunded collateral at the central bank. Users experience instant, irrevocable payment; the system quietly nets behind the scenes. It is a useful contrast with gross-settling instant rails like FedNow and a reminder that “instant” describes the experience, not necessarily the settlement.

The £1 million line

Faster Payments accepts payments up to £1 million under scheme rules, though banks impose lower customer limits in practice. Above the line sits CHAPS, the Bank of England’s unlimited, same-day system for high-value flows. Between them, the UK’s account-to-account traffic is split by size and urgency, with the overwhelming majority of payment volume travelling Faster Payments and the overwhelming majority of value travelling CHAPS.

Access has widened over time: non-bank payment firms can participate directly rather than through a sponsor bank, which the Bank of England enabled in 2018, a change many other jurisdictions have yet to match.

Reach

Faster Payments is a sterling-only domestic system; for cross-border flows it serves as the fast UK first or last mile, which is why interlinking projects like Nexus treat systems of its kind as the building blocks of faster international payments.