How To Obtain a UK Payments Standard

What is a standard?

A standard is a document that enables users to develop their products in a way that helps to achieve efficiency.  Standards also enable interoperability between systems and products.

Standards are developed by interested parties, e.g. users and manufacturers, and are agreed upon usually by consensus.  Conformance to standards is voluntary unless a national or regional directive mandates their use or an industry agreement is reached.

Standards can either be technical or procedural.

Why do we have standards?

We have standards to ensure that business processes and functions are carried out in the most efficient, cost effective, unambiguous way, for all the parties involved.

In the finance industry, there are many business functions that need to be undertaken by a large number of organisations.  For example, a business or store that accepts a credit or debit card must route the transaction back to the card scheme so that they can be paid.  The scheme in turn must bill the customer so that the card scheme can be reimbursed.

How do I obtain a standard?

Please click here for a list of publically available UK Payments Standards giving a brief description and the cost. 

Standards are circulated by the UK Payments Standards Unit to individual contact points for each organisation.   All updates are provided to the same contact point that has responsibility for circulating the standards and the updates within their organisations.

If you would like to purchase a UK Payments Standard please click here for instructions and payment methods.   Please note that standards that are not a full specification are issued free and these standards generally recognise and adopt standards published elsewhere.

To keep abreast of changes to the published standards there is an annual renewal charge of 50% of the original cost.

All standards are created in .pdf format.  To read the standards you will need Acrobat Reader which you can download free from the internet using the following hyperlink:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

For further information about the publicly available standards please e-mail the standards administrator samantha.mitchell@ukpayments.org.uk