ACI backs UK banks' push for sovereign payment rails

UK banks' reported plans to explore a domestic alternative to Visa and Mastercard have drawn support from payments firm ACI Worldwide, which said stronger competition in card and account-based payments could improve the UK's resilience to geopolitical risk.

Industry leaders are presenting the initiative as part of a broader push for sovereignty over critical payments infrastructure, rather than a narrow attempt to challenge the global card networks.

Resilience focus

Payments providers and banks are assessing how US political developments, including a possible second Donald Trump presidency, could affect cross-border flows and the governance of international card schemes. These concerns have pushed operational and geopolitical concentration risk higher up board agendas.

ACI Worldwide said alternative infrastructure is becoming a central part of national risk planning.

Richard Albery, Head of Banking, UK and Ireland at ACI Worldwide, said: "ACI welcomes competition that drives genuine innovation and modernisation in payments-so long as it's balanced against real regulatory and investment priorities. With rising geopolitical tensions and growing 'severe but plausible' risk scenarios, sovereignty and local control of critical payment systems are rapidly climbing the agenda for governments, scheme operators, and banks."

UK banks and regulators have already invested in domestic systems such as Faster Payments and the developing New Payments Architecture. The latest discussion goes beyond real-time account-to-account rails and considers whether the UK should add an indigenous card scheme-or a broader digital payments network that could operate if international providers were disrupted.

Alternative models

A new UK card scheme is only one of several possible routes, ACI Worldwide said. It pointed to a wider shift in major economies towards interoperable account-based systems and digital wallets that sit alongside, or underneath, existing card payments.

Albery added: "A UK alternative card network is one option, but it's not the only one. Account-to-account interoperability, resilient failover infrastructure, cross-border digital wallets and point-of-sale instant payments all offer powerful ways to strengthen national resilience while unlocking the next wave of payments innovation. Achieving any of this will require deep, coordinated industry collaboration to ensure new capabilities are robust, interoperable and built at meaningful scale."

Policy makers in India, Brazil and the euro area have already backed domestic payment infrastructures that operate as public or public-private utilities. India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Brazil's Pix have grown rapidly and now handle large shares of everyday consumer and merchant transactions. The European Payments Initiative is developing Wero as a regional wallet and scheme that works with instant payments.

Global precedents

Dean Wallace, Director of Consumer Payments Modernisation at ACI Worldwide, said UK banks are weighing similar structural options, describing a potential Visa-Mastercard contingency as broader risk management rather than a direct replacement.

Wallace said: "Building a failover to Visa and Mastercard is smart risk management-the question is whether the UK is willing to support a contingency it may rarely need to draw upon. Other markets haven't hesitated. India's UPI, Brazil's Pix and Europe's Wero don't just add resilience; they have rewired domestic payments with digital wallets, open APIs and instant rails. The result has been greater sovereignty, stronger competition and better value across both cards and account-to-account payments. The UK now faces a strategic choice: replicate the card schemes it already has, or invest in a truly alternative payments capability-as others have done and already benefited from."

UPI and Pix have each gained hundreds of millions of users in a few years and attracted financial and technology firms that build services on top of the core rails. Their growth has shifted transaction volumes away from cash and, in some cases, away from cards, while still relying on card schemes for international and higher-value transactions.

Strategic choices

In the UK, a domestic alternative would raise questions about funding, governance and the role of the public sector. Industry participants are debating whether any new infrastructure should sit within existing domestic schemes such as Pay.UK, or follow the multi-stakeholder models used elsewhere.

Banks and regulators would also need to decide whether a UK solution should prioritise consumer point-of-sale transactions, merchant-acquiring resilience, or wholesale and interbank flows. The technology could range from a card-like network that mirrors existing rules to a wallet and instant-payment architecture that supports both in-store and online commerce.

Supporters of a domestic scheme argue that heavy dependence on a small number of foreign-owned networks exposes the UK to sanctions policy, extraterritorial regulation and potential outages. Others point to the investment required and the risk that merchants and consumers may prefer familiar global brands, especially for cross-border use.

Industry collaboration

Albery said large-scale change in payments infrastructure would succeed only if banks, processors, merchants and regulators work in a coordinated way and align multiple projects under a shared roadmap.

"Achieving any of this will require deep, coordinated industry collaboration to ensure new capabilities are robust, interoperable and built at meaningful scale," Albery said.