For eight years, UK open banking has been a brilliant set of rails without a timetable. The plumbing worked — millions of account-to-account payments cleared every month — but there was no shared commercial framework to make recurring, card-free payments a mainstream default. On 2 June 2026, at Money20/20 Europe, that changed. The UK Payments Initiative (UKPI) went live with a finalised rulebook, a commercial model and operational standards for flexible, automated, recurring account-to-account payments. As a fintech developer and payment developer who has spent years wiring up Open Banking APIs, I think this is the most consequential structural upgrade to UK payments since Faster Payments launched.
This is not another pilot. UKPI Ltd is backed by an unusually broad coalition of founding shareholders — Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, Monzo, Revolut and Starling on the bank side, with Acquired, GoCardless, Plaid, TrueLayer and Yapily among the fintech founding members. When the high-street banks and the open banking fintechs sit at the same table and agree a rulebook, the thing that has been missing for years finally arrives: certainty.
What the UKPI scheme actually standardises
The headline capability is commercial variable recurring payments (cVRP) — recurring account-to-account payments where the consumer, not the merchant, sets the rules. Under the scheme a payer can define how long a permission lasts, the maximum that can be taken, and exactly who receives the money, all without sharing card details or setting up a traditional direct debit. The permission lives in the bank, is visible in the banking app, and can be revoked in one tap.
For a payment developer, the value of UKPI is less the technology — VRP has existed as an API pattern for a while — and more the scheme layer sitting on top of it:
- A shared rulebook that defines liability, dispute handling and refund obligations across every participant, so you build to one specification rather than negotiating bilaterally with each bank.
- A commercial model that finally answers "who pays whom" — the question that quietly killed countless open banking business cases.
- Operational standards for availability, performance and consumer protection, moving cVRP out of bespoke bank-by-bank integrations and toward predictable, scheme-grade reliability.
The FCA, which published a supporting statement the same day, called it "a major step forward for open banking and commercial variable recurring payments" and said it expects the launch to act "as a catalyst for other initiatives to emerge." Critically, the regulator confirmed it will consult on a long-term regulatory framework by the end of 2026 and supports establishing an independent standards-setting body. That sequencing — industry ships the rulebook, regulator codifies it afterwards — is how durable payment infrastructure usually gets built.
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About the Author
I'm Tom Wang, an AI Developer & Fintech Developer — building AI agents, crypto payment infrastructure, and cross-border payout systems with Rust, Go, and TypeScript. Based in London, UK.
Currently open to new opportunities in fintech, crypto payments, and AI agent engineering.
