PAYTECH FOCUS: REQUEST TO PAY
Adrian Smyth from NatWest, PayUK’s Simon Brooks and Louise Shorthouse from Icon Solutions, explore why Request to Pay is still waiting in the wings, and what more can be done to put it in the spotlight
A new digital payments system aimed at being fast, flexible, secure, data-rich, available to those traditionally underserved by banks, and with the added benefit of communication between payer and payee, came into being in the UK last year. Pay.UK’s Request to Pay (RTP) secure messaging channel has been built to overlay the UK’s existing payments infrastructure for ease of incorporation and interoperability. But, despite it sounding like a potential gold standard, take up, so far, can only be described as patchy since its launch in May 2021. According to a detailed international survey of industry stakeholders by payments fintech Icon Solutions, while almost 70 per cent of respondent banks
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and payment service providers (PSPs) saw the potential of RTP, only 18 per cent already offer it, and only a little more than a quarter of them (27 per cent) intend to do so within the next 12 months. The biggest obstacles to doing so were banks’ readiness (67 per cent), the need for secure customer authentication (54 per cent), and needing message standardisation to promote simplicity and interoperability (48 per cent). More than half of respondent banks and PSPs (54 per cent) listed limitations of existing technology and systems as holding back any RTP rollout, while fewer than half (48 per cent) had a clear strategy for adoption. On the plus side, nearly three-quarters of respondents (73 per cent) agreed that demand for RTP from corporates is
increasing; and that corporates have most to gain (75 per cent), followed by merchants (70 per cent). In the UK, RTP’s ability to help democratise digital payments has been highlighted from the get-go: its first certified provider, and the first to perform a live transaction, was digital platform Answer Pay, which was specifically founded to help the growing numbers of businesses and workers in the often financially under-served gig economy. Simon Brooks, faster payments service line manager at national payments authority Pay.UK, which moves more than £6.7trillion annually, says it has taken a holistic approach to creating the RTP service. He explains: “Unlike anything else I’ve ever done in the payments industry, we’ve ffnews.com
