Tap send in a banking app and a balance can appear in an e-wallet moments later. It looks like one movement but is really several: a check on the payee’s name, a message routed through a national scheme, an account at the far end that may not be in your name, and a settlement between banks at the Bank of England that can come hours later.
A scheme built in 2008
Faster Payments went live on 27 May 2008. Until then, a transfer made online or by phone took three days to clear; the new scheme aimed to cut that to a matter of hours, with a cap of £10,000 on internet and phone payments. Pay.UK, which took the scheme over in May 2018, runs it today.
As of October 2026, Faster Payments allows single payments of up to £1m, day and night, every day of the year. That is a ceiling: Pay.UK says providers can set their own limits, depending on how a payment is sent and the type of account, and some cap the daily total. In 2025 the system carried 5.55 billion payments worth £4.84 trillion.
Two ways to start a payment
The familiar route is to type in the wallet’s sort code, account number and account name. When you add a new payee, your bank runs Confirmation of Payee, a name check that compares what you typed with the name on the receiving account and comes back with a match, a close match or no match. It reached the biggest banks in 2020. By November 2025, the Payment Systems Regulator said, over 99% of organisations sending Faster Payments offered it, and more than 2 million checks were run every day.
The second route skips the typing. Where a wallet offers “pay by bank” as an alternative to topping up with a debit card, a regulated payment initiation provider prepares the payment with the details already filled in. You choose your bank, approve the payment in its app with Face ID, a fingerprint or a passcode, and your bank sends it over Faster Payments as an ordinary bank transfer, with no sort code or reference to mistype. By July 2026, Open Banking Limited counted more than one billion open banking payments through the UK’s biggest banks since the 2018 launch, 40.16 million of them in June.
Where the payment lands
Wallet providers that aren’t banks are generally e-money institutions, and Pay.UK offers firms like them three ways to connect to Faster Payments. Since July 2017, authorised e-money and payment firms have been able to apply for a settlement account at the Bank of England and connect directly; the first non-bank to join that way was TransferWise, now Wise, in April 2018. A firm can also connect directly but have a sponsor settle at the Bank on its behalf.
Or it can go wholly through a sponsor, known in the trade as an indirect access provider. Some sponsors give a payment firm a sort code of its own, so it can hand each customer a unique account number. Otherwise the firm keeps an account at the sponsor and tells customers apart by a unique reference, which is why wallets that work this way ask you to include one. Virtual accounts are another option: each customer gets an account number, but the money is pooled in real accounts behind them. As ClearBank, which provides them, puts it, “the account number works like a reference number”. However it arrives, e-money rules require the firm to safeguard customers’ money, for example by keeping it apart from its own in a separate account at a bank, under a regime the FCA tightened from 7 May 2026.
Spending from the wallet can bring checks of its own. Fortune Games, an online casino for over-18s that takes deposits through Skrill, Neteller and PayPal, spells one out in a plain-English guide to e-wallets: the wallet must be in your own name, as its terms require for every payment method.
The money between banks moves later
The customer’s payment is processed first; the banks square up afterwards. Pay.UK works out each settling participant’s net position, and those amounts are settled across accounts at the Bank of England three times every business day, at 7am, 1pm and 5pm as of October 2026. The Bank said in May 2026 that the lag can be “several hours for Faster Payments during the week”, and that over Easter the gap between retail settlements currently runs from Thursday evening to Tuesday morning.
To take the risk out of that gap, each direct settling participant must hold cash in a prefunding account at the Bank, enough to cover the most it could owe. Prefunding, the Bank says, “eliminates settlement risk but ties up segregated liquidity at a cost”. Since 1 July 2026, Pay.UK has let participants propose their own net sender cap, the limit on what they can owe other participants in each settlement cycle, rather than having to hold a fixed minimum.
New pipes, eventually
The system underneath is due for a rebuild, though not soon. Pay.UK’s planned replacement, the New Payments Architecture, started in 2017, has been dropped: its procurement was cancelled, and the government’s National Payments Vision, issued in November 2024, called for “a more agile and flexible approach”. Design work now sits with the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board, chaired by the Bank of England, which consulted until 11 September 2026 on next-generation infrastructure for a new industry-led Delivery Company to build. As of October 2026, the design is due to be handed to that company in spring 2027, and no date has been set for the new system to go live. In the meantime Pay.UK keeps Faster Payments running, and in December 2025 it extended its contracts with Vocalink, the Mastercard company that supplies the central infrastructure, into the early 2030s.
The Bank’s side has moved further: its renewed settlement system, RT2, went live on 28 April 2025 and can run almost around the clock. The Bank has proposed adding a weekend settlement day, most likely Sunday, “but not before 2029”, and says longer hours could allow more frequent net settlement overnight or at weekends.
So a wallet balance has made a longer trip than the screen suggests, and part of that trip is still under way when the money appears. What happens to it next is up to you. If any of it goes on a gambling site, set a budget before you start, and stop when it’s gone. Over-18s only; free support on 0808 8020 133.