The UK has an opportunity to design its next generation of retail payments infrastructure for an economy where money increasingly moves in real time and around the clock. That means looking beyond how quickly a payment can be initiated and considering whether the infrastructure behind it can support real-time settlement, liquidity and reconciliation as well.Many payment systems today are only partially real time, combining an instant customer experience with legacy processes behind the scenes. As transaction volumes grow and new payment models emerge, that disconnect will become increasingly difficult to sustain.The priority should be building a modernisation foundation that gives the UK flexibility to support account-to-account payments, cross-border transactions and emerging forms of digital money without having to redesign the underlying infrastructure for each new use case. At the same time, greater speed cannot come at the expense of resilience. In an always-on payments environment, the infrastructure supporting transactions needs to be just as available, secure and resilient as the services customers see.The biggest risk is treating these as separate challenges. Infrastructure designed too narrowly for today's payment models will need to be patched as new use cases emerge, and patching creates fragmentation. Fragmentation, in turn, undermines resilience, because complexity is the enemy of availability in an always-on environment. The UK should be most concerned about locking in an architecture that looks modern at launch but cannot evolve without being rebuilt.For the next generation infrastructure to deliver on that, the final framework needs to set out a clear commitment to real-time gross settlement as the foundation of what comes next. Equally important is interoperability: between domestic payment rails, cross-border systems and emerging forms of digital money. That needs to be designed in from the start, not retrofitted. The UK has a genuine opportunity to make infrastructure choices now that will determine its flexibility for the next decade, and the final report should reflect that ambition.No#PaymentsInfrastructureKanv Pandit, Head of International Markets – Banking and PaymentsHead of International Markets – Fidelity Information Services (FIS)10 Sep, 2026