As a modern, tech-forward company, you’re likely looking for a Faster Payments (FPS) API because you want to: 

• Revamp your client-facing operations and need a backend partner that can support that on an API level 
• Automate use cases for your customers (such as scheduled payments, as well as interoperability between payment processing systems like SWIFT and FPS) 
• Seamlessly integrate between your own API-based products and the payments and accounts of your banking provider 
• Partner with a new and modern Faster Payments (FPS) provider to diversify from incumbent banking partners 

Using an API is a lot better than using older methods like file-based integrations, SFTP/H2H, EBICS, or a portal. But the question after that is: what should you look for in a provider? How can you ensure you pick an API provider that suits your needs? That’s what we explore in this piece. 

Note: ClearBank is technology-led bank with an API-first tech stack that enables companies to access the payment schemes via API. Reach out to us to learn more about how we could help you.

In the UK, the Faster Payment System (FPS) rail is a real-time bank transfer network that enables individuals and businesses to send sterling payments between UK accounts almost instantly. 

Whereas other payment rails operate on  at least a T+1 basis (where funds settle a day after the transaction is initiated), Faster Payments takes a few seconds and allows you to transfer up to £1m per transfer, making it the most popular payment method in the country. 

Here are a few scenarios where it makes sense to use an API to access the Faster Payments scheme:

The world is moving at a faster pace than ever before, and payments must keep up. At ClearBank, we’re seeing an increase in use cases where near real-time payment processing is crucial, including: 

• Cross border payments 
• Disbursements 
• Open banking payments via third-party providers in retail 

If your product’s core apparel is speed, then using an API has to be a key part of your solution. If business logic requires payments to be part of a complex automated workflow (e.g., an earned wage access app or platform for delivery drivers), using means other than APIs may lead to delays and a poor user experience: having to wait for a manual “admin approval” for every payment batch will slow payments down and lead to churn. 

 Some causes for latency and risk in manual payment processing include: 

• User errors when having to manually initiate and process payments 
• Delays when payments must be sent as a batch through a payment file or manually inputted 
• Limited visibility and tracking, which makes it harder to identify failed, delayed, or duplicate payments in real time 
• Increased operational overhead as payment volumes grow, requiring more staff time 

APIs work in microseconds, making payments more transparent by enabling real-time transaction tracking and instant notifications.

Automation is one of the biggest advantages of using an API-based Faster Payments solution. In many modern payment flows, transactions need to happen immediately in response to a customer action or system event. 

For example, delivery platforms may need to pay drivers as soon as a job is completed, insurers may want to release claim funds instantly after approval, and retailers may need to trigger automatic refunds when a return is processed. In these scenarios, speed alone is not enough – payments must also be integrated directly into automated workflows. 

An API-based product enables this by allowing systems to trigger payments programmatically in real time. As soon as a predefined event occurs, the payment request can be automatically sent and processed through the Faster Payments rail. This creates a seamless customer experience while reducing operational overhead. 

You could take automation even further by, for example, automatically marking an invoice as paid when a bank confirms settlement, or automatically sending an email if a payment fails. Without an API, on the other hand, a payment manager has to manually upload CSV files of payments every few hours. This leads to human errors, and of course, is no longer instant.

As payment volumes scale, businesses often outgrow manual or semi-manual payment processes. These can include payment portals, CSV file uploads, batch processing workflows, or operational approval layers that rely on human intervention. While these methods may work at lower volumes, they can introduce operational bottlenecks as transaction numbers increase. 

For example, a business processing 100 payments per day through manual workflows may be able to manage with a small operations team. Scaling to 10,000 payments per day, however, can require significantly more operational oversight, causing costs and complexity to grow alongside revenue. 

APIs provide a more scalable and secure alternative by enabling systems to communicate directly with bank infrastructure through authenticated machine-to-machine connections. Rather than relying on users manually logging into systems, APIs typically use digital certificates and secure authentication protocols that are far less vulnerable to phishing or social engineering attacks. 

APIs also enable businesses to build automated fraud and risk controls directly into payment workflows. For example, payments can be automatically flagged if they deviate from expected patterns, or Confirmation of Payee checks can run milliseconds before payment initiation to verify account details. 

Every API call also creates a detailed audit trail of exactly what the system triggered which payment and why, making it a lot easier to do forensic accounting.

Once you reach a certain transaction volume, relying on a single Faster Payments provider becomes a risk. Any outage, degradation, or processing limit at that provider can delay or block all payments, creating a single point of failure that directly impacts your customers and operations. 

At this stage, it makes sense to start diversifying providers and working with different partners with different integration options. This improves resilience by ensuring you are not dependent on a single system. 

When searching for a provider that allows you to access the Faster Payments system via API, you’ll come across two provider profiles: 

1. Legacy banks: these are financial institutions with strong brands and a wide range of services. Although they have credibility, they may have an old IT infrastructure that does not fit with new models. 
2. Clearing infrastructure: these are newer providers that are lesser known, but are more adaptable, easier to access and make it a lot easier to implement faster payments 

Different providers offer different features and support different use cases. The following questions can help you assess whether a provider is the right fit for your needs. 

• Which schemes do you provide direct access to? 
• How is your firm regulated – are you a bank, payments institution or an EMI? 
• Where are your customer funds stored? 
• Do you offer operating, client segregated, client money and multicurrency accounts? 
• Do you provide real and virtual accounts? 
• Do you have an active status page on the client portal displaying real-time payment and account information? 
• What was your uptime in the previous 6 months? 
• What are your SLAs for responding to and resolving issues? 
• Do you have a dedicated customer portal? 
• What is your maximum TPS (transactions per second)? 
• What are your payment SLOs/SLAs for inbound/outbound payments? 
• Do you conduct payment screening? 
• What types of FPS transactions do you support? For example, do you support future-dated payments, standing orders, and payments originating overseas? 
• What is the maximum value you allow for FPS payments? 
• What is the integration process like? 

Read our full buyer’s guide to learn more: Buyer’s guide to finding your perfect banking partner 

ClearBank is a technology-led bank with an API-first tech stack that delivers near real-time payments and a direct participant of the Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS and Cheques schemes. Building and maintaining direct integrations requires significant capital investment, ongoing regulatory compliance, and continuous testing, while the process of becoming a participant is long, complex, and resource intensive. Managing this in-house often diverts time and effort away from core product development. 

By partnering with us, you gain access to these payment schemes through a single API, with a much lower operational overhead. This allows you to get started in a fraction of the time, avoid the complexity of compliance and scheme maintenance, and focus your team on building world-class products and services instead of payments infrastructure. 

Here’s why companies like Airwallex, Coinbase, and TrueLayer partner with us: 

A critical requirement for our clients is that the API can consistently support high transaction volumes. Performance observed in sandbox or test environments is useful but does not in itself provide assurance of reliability under production-scale conditions. 

When choosing an API provider, it’s essential to ensure they can support your growth over the long term. Selecting and integrating with a banking partner remains time- and resource-intensive process, making long-term suitability a critical consideration you don’t want to repeat it every couple of years. That’s why scalability should be non-negotiable from the outset. 

Our flexible API has been proven to sustain high volumes of requests per second per client,  without introducing any latency that could interrupt day-to-day payment operations. With ClearBank, you also gain near real-time updates from the payment schemes via webhooks. This means you can notify customers faster, reduce support queries, and deliver the speed and responsiveness customers now expect, helping to drive retention. 

This capability is proven in practice through our customers, which include large organisations with tens of millions of end users that process millions of transactions every day, such as Coinbase and TrueLayer. 

Speed is fundamental to the value an API delivers. If payments aren’t processed quickly and reliably, many of the benefits of API-driven infrastructure are lost. 

At ClearBank, speed is a core strength of our API, particularly for inbound Faster Payments. This is driven by the infrastructure we’ve built and our commitment to continuous improvement. We support customers operating in highly time-sensitive environments, such as Open Banking payments, where there is a desire for transactions to complete in under two seconds. 

Beyond speed, our model allows you to retain full ownership of the customer journey, including: 

• Onboarding and account opening flows 
• UX and interaction design 
• Customer communications and notifications 
• First-line customer support 

For fintechs, customer experience is critical to both acquisition and retention. You don’t want to force users through bank-owned interfaces or third-party portals, you want to own the entire experience. 

With ClearBank, you stay in control of both your brand and the technical elements of your product, from flow logic to loading times. Your customers interact solely with your workflows and interfaces, while ClearBank operates seamlessly in the background, handling the infrastructure and regulatory responsibilities.

As your product evolves and scales, you’ll likely want to introduce new services and capabilities that add value to your customers. 

With ClearBank, you’re not limited to single immediate payments via FPS. Our platform gives you access to a comprehensive set of payments, including: 

• Domestic and overseas payments 
• Future-dated payments (scheduled payments) 
• Repeated payments (standing orders) 

You can also enable additional capabilities that help reduce fraud and increase confidence, including Confirmation of Payee. 

Because ClearBank is a direct participant in the UK payment schemes, you can choose to access Bacs and CHAPS alongside Faster Payments. The result is broader functionality, greater resilience, and a simpler, more reliable payments infrastructure as you grow. 

TrueLayer is an open banking payments network that enables secure, efficient, and fast online payments via real-time payments and financial and identity data. It can complete payouts in seconds and partners with entities such as Revolut, Stripe, and Shopify. 

TrueLayer uses ClearBank’s Faster Payments API to instantly pay out to the bank account that made the initial transaction. As an open banking provider, payments need to be completed in microseconds so that the user’s flow isn’t interrupted and causes an error. ClearBank needs to be able to receive and accept payments, monitor payment transactions, and do fraud screening within microseconds. 

Not only are they processing quickly, but volume has not been an issue. Within just a few months of launching in 2021, ClearBank was processing millions of pounds of transactions. This volume has grown year over year, and since January 2023, volumes are up seven times. Having strong uptime is also critical, and ClearBank has been able to offer 24x7 availability with no downtime. 

“A really important element of our ClearBank relationship is that we don't have incidents. Being able to scale a payments product with a partner that you can trust with operational resiliency is so valuable - it sounds simplistic to say ‘ClearBank just works’ but it does. Being able to rely on ClearBank frees us up to focus on growing our merchant base.” 

Benjamin Woodcock, Payment Infrastructure Partnerships Lead, TrueLayer 

Read the full case study here: How TrueLayer launched innovative closed loop payments in collaboration with ClearBank

Without an API, processing Faster Payments can be time consuming, takes up a lot of resources, causes errors, and is a lot harder to scale. An API-first approach enables near-instant payments and the secure processing of millions of transactions, freeing your teams to focus on what matters most: building an outstanding product and customer experience. 

At ClearBank, we deliver clearing infrastructure built entirely on APIs. That focus allows us to deliver a faster, more reliable, and more scalable experience for our customers. 

Reach out to one of our experts to see how we can help you.