National Payments Plan
Deliver Innovation | Enhance Inclusion | Maintain and Extend Integrity
‘The aim of the National Payments Plan is to ensure that consumers, businesses and other organisations have access to a broad range of payment methods that meet their needs, and that they are confident in using them.’
The National Payments Plan is a set of projects and activities that look at how we can enhance and improve payments. It sets out publicly the agenda for much of our work. We refresh the Plan every three years and published the most recent Plan in October 2011.
Actions are grouped into three themes:
- Innovation – enhancing existing and developing new payment services
- Inclusion - ensuring payment services are designed to meet the widest possible range of users
- Integrity – making sure the operation of the payment systems is robust and preventing fraud
Covering these themes, actions in the Plan include:
- Mobile Payments - An industry wide project to enable payments to be made using just a mobile number.
- Multiple Authorisations - A commitment to offer an electronic alternative to dual signatory cheques to non-personal account holders by the end of 2013.
- Research with disabled consumers and people aged 80 and over to better understand their payment needs.
- Delegating Payments - Work to explore mechanisms to delegate payments – to address the needs of the housebound.
- Misdirected Payments - A project to help prevent payments being made to the wrong account.
- Access to Cash - Research to understand access to cash issues and work to identify improvements for affected customer groups.