Customers today expect payments to feel instant. In the UK, Faster Payments is the scheme that makes those near-real-time transfers possible. 

As a financial institution or a fintech business, the real challenge lies in making Faster Payments work reliably within your own operations. That could mean: 

• Replacing slow FPS processes like manual approvals, portals, or uploading CSV files  
• Improving payment visibility to meet customer expectations  
• Choosing the right provider when connecting to the scheme  
• Finding infrastructure that supports higher volumes without adding manual reconciliation 

Whatever the case, understanding Faster Payments can help you assess what to implement or improve in your current setup.  

In this guide, we’ll cover: 

• Faster Payments explained: What is the Faster Payments System?  
• How does FPS differ from Bacs, CHAPS, and other payment methods?  
• What are the types of Faster Payments transactions? 
• How Faster Payments work: The FPS payment flow  
• Direct vs indirect access to Faster Payments: Which route makes sense? 
• Why choose ClearBank for Faster Payments? 
• How ClearBank helps PingPong deliver scalable UK payments for global merchants processing $350 billion in payment value 
   

Note: ClearBank provides access to Faster Payments and other UK schemes with an API-first approach to banking. Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help you. 

The Faster Payment System (FPS) is a UK payment scheme that enables near-real-time sterling payments between participating financial institutions. 

FPS was launched in 2008, allowing participating financial institutions to send and receive payments 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, usually within seconds. In exceptional circumstances, a Faster Payment may take up to two hours to arrive. 

In 2025, FPS processed over 5.55 billion payments with a total value of £4.84 trillion. 

The Faster Payment system has had a £1,000,000 payment limit since February 2023, representing a fourfold increase over the former System limits. 

The increase in Faster Payments limits enables customers to make high-value payments with the same speed and efficiency as smaller transactions, although the permitted transferable amount is subject to individual financial institutions' thresholds. 

ClearBank offers the maximum limit of £1m, so your firm can support large-scale transactions as needed.

A major benefit is that real-time payments can be sent and received at any time, including outside of traditional banking hours, such as evenings, weekends, and bank holidays.  

Businesses can also initiate FPS in several ways, including through banking portals or file-based workflows, where your team uploads payment information in bulk. For higher volumes, an API connection is often more efficient because it enables you to automate payment initiation and receive updates without relying on manual inputs.  

Overall, the quality of the payment experience still depends on how your business connects to FPS. The right setup can make it easier to manage payment visibility and reconciliation, without adding unnecessary manual work for your team.

The speed of FPS differs from traditional payment methods like cheques or Bacs transfers, which take longer to clear. That said, each payment scheme has its own features and use cases.

Whether you need access to Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS, or cheques, ClearBank is a direct participant in all major UK schemes. Get in touch with our team to learn more.

The Faster Payment System supports four payment types: 

1 . Single immediate payments: One-off real-time transactions for general use and, as a result, the most common type of payment.

Example: A customer moving money from one account to another, or a business sending an instant refund or payout.  

2. Forward-dated payments: One-off transactions, sent and received on a future date set by the customer.

Example: Businesses scheduling supplier payments to leave on specific invoice due dates.  

3. Standing orders: Regular fixed-amount transactions scheduled to be repeated within a set time frame (such as monthly, quarterly, yearly). 

Example: A customer paying rent or a business making a recurring fixed payment to a service provider.

4. Direct corporate access payments: For corporate business customers to send transactions in the form of bulk files.

Example: A company sending a large batch of payments to suppliers or employees. 

FPS payments can move in two directions:

• Outbound: The customer sends money to the beneficiary. 
• Inbound: The customer receives money from the sender.

To initiate a Faster Payments transaction with ClearBank, the sender must supply the recipient’s International Bank Account Number (IBAN). Note that FPS, as a scheme, will accept the sort code and account number (SCAN). They also input the transaction amount, add any required reference details, and then verify the payment.

The overall Faster Payments flow can be broken down into five stages. We’ll use ClearBank as an example:

1. The customer initiates a transaction via their bank’s or payment provider’s interface. 
2. The customer’s bank or payment provider sends the payment instruction through ClearBank’s Faster Payments API. 
3. ClearBank receives and verifies the payment instructions and passes them onto the FPS scheme. At the same time, ClearBank will debit the payment’s amount from the debitor’s account. 
4. The beneficiary’s bank receives the funds from the scheme. 
5. The payment amount is credited in the beneficiary’s account. 

Businesses can connect to FPS either directly or indirectly. 

Direct access means becoming a direct participant in the scheme yourself. This gives you more control over your payment operations, but it also comes with significant setup and ongoing responsibilities.

Collateral requirements can exceed £1 million, and annual attestations can take months of staff time. For some firms, the application process and technical integrations can take over a year. And that doesn’t include ongoing committee meetings, annual attestations, and periodic testing requirements from the scheme.

Indirect access means connecting through a provider that already has direct access to Faster Payments. This allows you to offer FPS without taking on the full investment of becoming a direct scheme participant yourself.

Direct access can make sense for large banks, established PSPs, or firms with the scale and internal expertise to manage scheme participation. Pay.UK currently lists 47 Faster Payments direct participants, which shows that direct access remains a relatively specialist route compared with indirect access. For most businesses, indirect access is the more practical option.

ClearBank is a UK-authorised B2B bank built to support businesses with modern, cloud-native infrastructure. We’re a direct participant in the UK’s main payment schemes, including Faster Payments, the Bacs payment system, Cheque and Credit Clearing, and CHAPS. 

Through ClearBank Europe, we also support SEPA Instant and SEPA Credit Transfer for euro payments.

Read our report on the rapid SEPA Instant adoption in Europe here. 

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

Building and maintaining direct participation in FPS requires significant capital investment and continuous testing. For example, collateral requirements can exceed £1 million. Unless direct access to FPS is core to your business model, it can take time and funds away from higher-priority activities.  

ClearBank is a direct participant in the Faster Payments System. Through us, you can access FPS without becoming a direct participant yourself and initiate single immediate payments, future-dated payments, and standing orders. We also support the maximum Faster Payments limit of £1m, enabling your business to process higher-value FPS payments where needed. 

You can also enable capabilities like Confirmation of Payee to help reduce fraud and increase customer trust before payments are made. All client funds are held securely at the Bank of England and are available 24/7, year-round.  

For businesses processing higher payment volumes, the way you connect to Faster Payments makes a difference. Manual workflows and portals can slow down payment operations, even when the payment scheme itself is near real-time. 

With ClearBank’s Faster Payments API, you can initiate payments directly from your own systems, automate payment workflows, and receive near real-time updates through webhooks. Your team can track payment statuses and reconciliation more easily, while giving customers the faster notifications they expect.  

ClearBank’s API is built to support high-volume payment operations. It can sustain a very large number of requests per second and per client. You can also use our API for payment triggered by customer actions or system events, such as refunds or disbursements. 

Our clients can choose from a variety of account structures: 

• Real accounts, where you and your customers have a physical bank account 
• Virtual accounts, which sit on top of one or more real accounts and allow you to assign unique account details like vIBANs to specific customers or use cases 
• A combination of both, depending on your needs 

The account types we offer include: 

• Operating accounts 
• Customer segregated accounts 
• Client money accounts 
• Multi-currency accounts 

As your needs become more advanced, ClearBank also supports embedded banking use cases, helping eligible businesses offer interest-bearing savings accounts. For eligible deposits, ClearBank’s embedded banking model can also support FSCS protection up to £120,000 under the UK’s deposit guarantee scheme. 

In Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ study of ClearBank’s embedded banking model, it was found that this service delivered £9.7 million in business growth benefits for our clients and ROI of 90%, with payback in 10 months. 

TrueLayer is Europe’s leading open banking payments network - powering secure, efficient and faster online payments by combining real-time bank payments with financial and identity data. 

Existing refund processes are inefficient and error-prone, resulting in higher costs and an increased operational effort for merchants due to, for example, manually tracking and managing multiple payment reports. The TrueLayer closed loop product offers seamless refunds and payouts, with no need for manual data entry. 

ClearBank handles all the underlying product aspects of merchant accounts, including seamless reconciliation that eliminates the previously manual or semi-automated process of matching funds received to their corresponding transaction. By connecting to FPS, ClearBank enables TrueLayer to instantly pay out to the bank account that initiated the initial transaction. 

“ClearBank’s instant first capabilities are critical. They know that we want to settle everything over FPS and that's never a debate. We don't want to say it’s ‘instant’ and then have to settle things over Bacs.” Benjamin Woodcock, Payment Infrastructure Partnerships Lead, TrueLayer 

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

Faster Payments is a popular payment scheme in the UK, but getting the most value from FPS depends on the underlying infrastructure. The right setup helps you deliver a smooth customer experience, while back-end automations reduce manual work for your team.

Through ClearBank’s API-first infrastructure, you can access Faster Payments and its varied payment types. And if you want to grow into wider payment and account capabilities, ClearBank has the infrastructure to support your next steps.  

Read our report on clearing and the UK’s main payment schemes or reach out to one of our experts to see how we can help.