Mastercard to Open Account-to-Account Instant Payments Sandbox to UK Banks

Mastercard will begin allowing U.K. banks and financial institutions to access its fifth-generation account-to-account (A2A) instant payments via a sandbox later this year.

This offering will allow U.K. banks and financial institutions to innovate, test and refine new payment services within a trusted and secure environment and without impacting critical infrastructure, the company said in a Tuesday (June 24) press release.

“Account-to-account payments in the U.K. are already an enormous part of the U.K.’s financial landscape,” Peter Reynolds, executive vice president, Mastercard Real Time Payments, said in the release. “The Mastercard A2A instant payments Sandbox opens our innovative technology to our partners to develop and test new potential services.”

The sandbox will allow banks and financial institutions to experiment with ways to modernize the U.K.’s A2A payment ecosystem using Mastercard’s payment technology, including new flows across person to person, person to merchant, and business to business use cases, according to the release.

Because the sandbox will adhere to ISO20022 standards, it will provide rich data that will support advancements such as enhancements in fraud detection and reduction, the release said.

Access to the sandbox comes at a time when the U.K. government is promoting its National Payments Vision (NPV), which aims to boost the country’s economic growth through the adoption of modern services, per the release.

“Alongside the U.K. government’s National Payments Vision, we’re setting out a bold vision of the future in A2A real-time payments,” Reynolds said in the release.

When announcing the publication of the National Payments Vision, the U.K. government said it aims to support the payments sector in delivering economic growth, PYMNTS reported in January.

The announcement said the sector includes some of the U.K.’s highest-growth businesses and that the National Payments Vision’s goal is to see the sector “deliver world-leading payments.”

It was reported in May that while excitement around open banking accompanied the past decade’s U.K. FinTech boom, open banking has not lived up to its potential in the U.K.

While open banking has seen success in some areas, like allowing for faster lending decisions, it lags far behind cards when it comes to payments.