Our Role
Our role is to develop, and support the development in national and international fora, appropriate standards for the payments industry (that is, standards which promote the integrity and efficiency of payment systems and benefit Members and Clearing Companies). To coordinate UK payment standards activities on behalf of the Payments Council, interest groups and the Clearing Companies, ensuring there is a clear and consistent policy and business rationale wherever possible, and in so doing provide a centre of expertise.
Our Key Principles
The following principles underpin our standardisation work:
- wherever possible, to adopt Global, European, or domestic standards, in that order, over proprietary standards;
- the UK should seek to play an active role in developing new global/European standards relevant to the banking and payments industry, and where appropriate engage with corporate representative bodies;
- standards should be designed to cover the complete end-to-end payment transaction chain, including customer initiation and notification/reconciliation, as well as identification and authentication;
- convergence between different standards organisations should be encouraged as part of a wider consolidation process, click here for a brief summary of the standard organisations we deal with;
- standard development must result in practical solutions that seek to minimise business impact on the adopters, with due consideration given to legacy migration issues.
Other areas covered and sponsored by the Standards Unit include:
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Latest News
- 4 million benefit recipients still prevented from using UK cash machine network (2 September 10)
- New reports reveal all about payments in the UK (23 August 10)
- Payments Council Welcomes Handelsbanken (18 August 10)