The UK’s plans to modernise retail payments are entering a more practical phase, as the focus moves from strategy and consultation towards the realities of delivery under the National Payments Vision.

Young Pham, chief strategy officer and SVP, head of banking and financial services at CI&T, shares his perspective on what happens when large-scale payments reform moves from policy ambition to system build, and why the decisions taken at this stage will influence how the UK’s future payments infrastructure performs in practice.

There’s a pattern that plays out in most large infrastructure programmes. The early stages get all the attention – the strategy documents, the governance frameworks, the headline objectives. Then comes the part that actually determines whether the thing works. That’s the build. And in the UK’s payments reform, we’re now squarely in that territory.

For the best part of a year now, the conversation around the National Payments Vision has centred on direction and ambition. Fair enough – those conversations have needed to happen. But the publication of the Strategy for Future Retail Payments Infrastructure by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee in November 2025 shifted things.

It confirmed how HM Treasury and the relevant authorities plan to work together going forward, and it acknowledged something that people close to these programmes already know: the decisions made during build and early operation are the ones that stick.

So, the question now is less about what the UK wants its payments infrastructure to do, and more about how it gets put together – something which was kicked-off recently with the publication of the Payments Forward Plan by the Payments Vision Delivery Committee.

Who connects directly? How is responsibility divided up? What happens when volumes grow and existing rails need to coexist with new ones? Those are just some of the delivery questions that need to be asked, and they’re where experience from other national-scale instant payments systems starts to matter.

Lessons from Brazil’s PIX rollout

The National Payments Vision has acknowledged Brazil’s PIX as a leading example already operating at scale. Brazil is certainly a useful place to start. The country has been running an instant payments system embedded in everyday economic activity for several years, rather than confined to pilots or trials.

PIX was introduced in late 2020 as a central-bank operated instant payments platform, intended from the outset to support everyday payments across the economy rather than sit alongside existing schemes. Participation by major banks and payment providers was mandated on a fixed timetable, which meant scale was not something the system could grow into gradually. It had to be ready to carry volume from the start.

That approach placed much of the responsibility on the institutions themselves. Banks had to modify internal platforms to support continuous availability, update payment routing to accommodate identifiers such as phone numbers and QR codes, and handle fraud monitoring and settlement in real time across customer journeys that had previously depended on batch processing or restricted operating hours. Much of this work took place behind the scenes, within core banking systems that customers rarely see.

Adoption grew steadily as PIX was folded into routine activity, from person-to-person transfers through to retail payments and small business use. By 2024, the system was processing more than 60 billion transactions a year and had become a standard way for people to move money day-to-day.

As reliance increased, questions around transaction limits, access models, fraud controls and liability became operational concerns, handled daily by banks and payment providers responding to live behaviour. Choices made early in the build began to show up in practical ways, affecting cost, resilience and customer experience.

How infrastructure choices affect access

A common characteristic of large instant payments systems is that inclusion tends to emerge from how the infrastructure operates in practice, rather than how it is framed in policy discussions. Factors such as access rules, pricing models and participation requirements all affect who ends up using the system and how frequently, particularly once payment behaviour becomes routine.

In Brazil, low transaction costs combined with widespread availability shaped the way the system was adopted in everyday life. PIX became a common method for routine payments, used by individuals and small businesses alongside cards and cash. Its reach expanded through regular day-to-day use rather than through dedicated financial inclusion programmes.

The UK is starting from a different context, but some of the underlying pressures are similar. For smaller businesses, the cost and operational complexity of accepting multiple payment types remains a practical concern. Cash still plays an important role for parts of the population, while many digital payment tools have been designed primarily with mainstream convenience in mind rather than ease of use across every segment of society.

Clarity around responsibility

As PIX usage increased, fraud and misuse followed. This was expected but what mattered was how responsibility and controls were handled once behaviour patterns became clear. Transaction limits, monitoring and response processes evolved over time as banks and payment providers dealt with live conditions rather than theoretical scenarios.

At scale, instant payments concentrate risk in different ways to batch-based systems. Errors spread quicker. Irreversible transfers raise the stakes. Clear operational ownership becomes as essential as technical capability.

For the UK, this highlights the importance of clarity around responsibility as new infrastructure is introduced. How risk is handled in practice, across institutions and over time, will impact confidence in the system far more than stated safeguards alone.

The real work begins

Nobody remembers the press release. They remember whether the thing worked when they needed it to. That’s where the UK’s payments reform is heading now into a phase where the infrastructure either holds up under real use or it doesn’t. The announcements are done. What comes next is the part that people and businesses will actually feel.

Getting that right means taking the practical decisions seriously from the outset – how systems are sequenced, how risk is distributed, how institutions coordinate when things go wrong at pace. Anyone who has worked inside a large-scale instant payments build knows these are the details that define the outcome, long after the strategy documents have been filed away.