Faster Payments celebrated its sixteenth year of operation in 2024, and in that time it has become the backbone of UK consumer and business payment flows in a way that has no direct equivalent in most other major economies. The US did not launch FedNow until 2023. The EU's instant payments mandate — requiring payment service providers to offer instant credit transfers under the updated SEPA Instant framework — took effect only in 2024. The UK's early adoption of near-real-time interbank settlement created a unique market environment: an economy where the settlement infrastructure for A2A payments has been live for over a decade, but where the commercial product layer to capture the value of that infrastructure has taken until very recently to arrive in earnest.
The sixteen years between the launch of Faster Payments and the current commercial maturity of the A2A product ecosystem is not evidence of slow adoption. It reflects the genuine difficulty of the layer above the rails. Faster Payments provides settlement finality in seconds, but it does not provide the reconciliation data to match a received payment against an outstanding invoice. It does not provide the dispute resolution framework to handle a payment that was not received. It does not provide the authentication mechanism that allows a payer to authorise a payment from a merchant's checkout flow without leaving the merchant context and manually entering bank details. Each of these missing components required either a regulatory mandate (Open Banking payment initiation) or a commercial infrastructure company to build it. The commercial infrastructure has taken until now to mature because the regulatory components that enabled it were themselves slow to arrive.
Variable Recurring Payments is the component of the Faster Payments commercial ecosystem that we believe is furthest behind its potential. VRP's sweeping use case — moving money between accounts owned by the same person — is live and reasonably well adopted for savings automation use cases. The commercial VRP use case — allowing a third party to debit a customer's account for variable amounts within consented parameters, without requiring a separate authentication step for each transaction — remains limited to a small number of pilot deployments. The PSR's roadmap for commercial VRP mandates has moved more slowly than the industry had hoped, but the direction remains clear. When commercial VRP is mandated, the most immediate impact will be on direct debit: a BACS direct debit for a utility bill or subscription payment requires seven days' advance notice, processes through a batch clearing cycle, and provides no real-time confirmation of success or failure. A VRP equivalent settles in seconds, with immediate notification and without the advance notice requirement. The operational improvement is significant.
The treasury and cash management layer is where we see some of the most commercially interesting development in 2024. Atlar, a portfolio company building AI-native treasury infrastructure, is addressing the fundamental multi-bank visibility problem: finance teams managing payments and cash positions across multiple banking relationships have historically needed to log into each bank's portal separately and reconcile positions manually. Atlar's agentic approach — connecting to multiple banks via open banking APIs and applying AI to automate reconciliation and cash forecasting — is one of the clearest examples of a product that only becomes commercially viable when AI-native architecture replaces the legacy spreadsheet workflow. The companies that get treasury infrastructure right generate exceptional retention because the product becomes embedded in the core cash management workflow, and switching costs compound with every additional banking relationship integrated.