Imposing a new architecture on the UK’s ageing payments infrastructure in conjunction with the wider adoption of real-time payments could boost the country’s economy by $3.8billion (0.11 per cent of formal GDP) within the next four years.
Likewise, the ‘untapped potential’ of real-time payments in the UK is now being recognised, while the theoretical impact of all payments being real-time could boost the UK’s economy by up to $98.0billion in 2026, or 2.7 per cent annually.
This narrative is the primary finding of a recent study published by ACI Worldwide, the data and analytics company Global Data and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr).
The research emphasises the importance of the UK’s ‘New Payments Architecture (NPA)’ programme which is set to bring sweeping changes to the UK’s payments infrastructure over the next five years with the aim to enable more innovation and foster competition among UK financial services providers.
Led by Pay.UK, NPA is seeking to modernise the UK’s legacy payment infrastructure by delivering real-time account-to-account payments that provide consumers with more choice and newer, innovative payment options over more traditional payment types such as cards.
The findings of the study come after the latest UK GDP figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) continue to show sluggish output for the UK economy in 2022 and follow recent IMF forecasts suggesting the UK is set to have the weakest growth in the G7 next year.
Despite the continued growth of the UK’s real-time account-to-account payments (the number of payments processed by Faster Payments (FPS) increased by 23 per cent to 3.6 billion in 2021), the data indicated that growth rates for real-time transactions are higher in many other countries.