Wahey! Record payment volumes for Pay.UK
They’re dancing in the streets as Pay.UK’s Bacs posted record volumes and values in 2018 as it reckons the industry revamp has ramped up.
Bacs Payment Schemes Limited, owned by retail payments authority Pay.UK (previously the New Payment System Operator), processed 6.4 billion transactions worth just shy of £5 trillion across the year.
Bacs processed 6.4 billion transactions
According to the deliriously happy Pay.UK, that continues more than a decade of growth – back in 2006, the annual high for Bacs transactions was “just” five billion, a record which has been broken every year since.
Paul Horlock, chief executive of Pay.UK, says: “We are working hard to create the best retail payments industry in the world, and results like this underline the strength of the foundations on which we are building. We are committed to enabling a vibrant UK economy, and the continued growth of these established payment products can only help us in delivering that.”
It’s a frenzy of stats, as Pay.UK reveals that across August 2018 alone, 580 million payments were processed, smashing the existing record of 573 million, which had stood for almost three years (December 2015).
A new daily high of 114 million transactions was set at the end of the same month but stood only briefly, as 123 million payments were processed in a single day in November, an increase of almost 8%.
Direct Debits reached nearly 4.4 billion transactions – that’s more than eight Direct Debits for every UK adult – while Bacs Direct Credit, used to pay wages, salaries, pensions, and benefits, as well as supplier payments, saw values of almost £3.63 billion, the highest recorded; that compares with £2.96 billion ten years earlier.
In 2018, Pay.UK brought together the UK’s retail payment services, with Bacs, Faster Payments, and Cheque and Credit Clearing all now part of the same organisation.
The company explains that it is responsible for leading change within the industry. Those developments range from creating rules and standards to help protect against fraud to delivering the National Payments Architecture, a project to improve and future-proof payment processing.
