Barry Kislingbury, Lead Solutions Consultant Consumer Banking Europe, ACI Worldwide comments on the initial report of the World Class Payments Project, published by Payments UK today:

“The World Class Payments Project which was launched to set out a ten- year vision on how to achieve a first-class payments environment is fantastic news for UK banks and consumers.

“The project has already identified that access to the payments infrastructure needs to be simpler and provide a level playing field for all payment service providers, and that customer’s needs and ease of use are not at the heart of the environment currently in place. The ultimate goal of the project is to simplify and improve the end-to-end experience of consumers, drive innovation and competition, standardise interfaces, all whilst having the ability to change the core processing schemes without affecting services.

“The project will place the UK at the leading edge of the global changes in the sector and could give UK banks a real competitive advantage over their European counterparts who are also looking at these issues, but the UK has the ability to move much faster. The banks, if they seize the opportunity, have a chance to place themselves back at the centre of the payments ecosystem and become the Amazon or iTunes of their customer’s financial services world. Financial institutions should embrace this new world, and start laying the foundations for becoming ‘digital banks’ ready to operate in a digital economy.”