Bank of England announces that, for the first time, a non-bank payment services provider has accessed the UK payments system directly.

By Andrew Moyle, Stuart Davis, Charlotte Collins, and Brett Carr

The Bank of England has announced that a regulated payment services provider (PSP) has become the first non-bank direct participant in the UK’s Faster Payments system. This was facilitated by the Bank of England extending settlement account access in its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system to non-bank PSPs, which was announced in July 2017 (see Latham’s related blog post). This change enabled non-bank PSPs to access the UK payment schemes that settle in central bank money directly for the first time, rather than needing to “plug in” to these systems indirectly via settlement agent banks.