Last week brought one of the more significant payments stories of the year, and it barely made the local papers. Britain's biggest banks have started raising money for a new organisation whose long term aim is to build a home grown payments system that could one day sit alongside Visa and Mastercard. For independent shops, cafés and pubs across Essex and Cambridgeshire who hand over a slice of every card sale to the card schemes, that is worth paying attention to.
But it is also worth keeping in perspective. Nothing about how you take a card payment is changing this week, this month or this year. So here is my plain English take on what has actually been announced, what it could mean for card payment fees in the long run, and what I would do about your costs right now, rather than waiting for a solution that is still years away.
What has actually been announced?
The new body is called the UK Payments Delivery Company, or UK PDC. According to reports published on 16 and 18 September 2026, it has opened a fundraising round of around £50 million. The initial funding comes from 19 organisations, including the four big high street banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest), along with names such as Nationwide, Wise, PayPal, Citi and JP Morgan. Mastercard and Visa themselves are also listed among the participants.
The money is intended to fund the company through to 2028, covering its setting up and early development stages. It grew out of the Treasury's National Payments Vision, and it works alongside a Bank of England chaired board that is expected to publish a blueprint for the country's future payments infrastructure in early 2027.
In short: it is a serious, well backed project, but it is at the very beginning. Reports are clear that a working system at scale is not expected until after 2028.
Why does a British alternative to the card schemes matter to a local shop?
Every time a customer taps a card on your counter, the cost you pay is made up of several layers. There is interchange (a fee that goes to the customer's bank), scheme fees (charged by Visa or Mastercard for using their network) and your provider's own margin on top. You rarely see these separated out on a statement, which is exactly how costs creep up without anyone noticing.
The Payment Systems Regulator has already concluded, in its review of card scheme and processing fees, that Visa and Mastercard face insufficient competition, and it has been working on remedies to make scheme pricing clearer for acquirers and, in turn, for merchants. A genuine domestic alternative is the other half of that picture: competition, rather than regulation alone, is what usually brings prices down.
Competition is what keeps prices honest. Until it arrives, the best protection for your margins is knowing exactly what you pay and who you pay it to.
If the UK PDC eventually succeeds, independent businesses could one day have more choice over how card and account to account payments are routed, and that pressure could help keep scheme fees in check. That would be good news for the local multiplier effect too: every pound not lost to a distant network is a pound that stays in your till, and much of that is spent again in your own town.
What it does not change (yet)
I want to be straightforward here, because this is the sort of headline that some providers will use to sell you something. The UK PDC does not reduce your fees today. It does not change your card machine, your contract or your settlement times. Nobody can sign you up to it. If anyone tells you otherwise, ask them to put it in writing.
What it does do is confirm that the direction of travel is towards more transparency and more competition in UK payments. That puts independent businesses in a stronger position to ask hard questions of their current provider, and to expect clear answers.
What to do this week
Rather than waiting until 2028, here are the practical steps I would take now:
- Pull out your last three statements. Work out your effective rate by dividing your total fees by your total card takings. If you cannot find the total fees easily, that tells you something.
- Check your contract end date. Rigid 36 month lock ins with steep exit fees are exactly what keeps businesses stuck when better options appear. A flexible monthly rolling agreement lets you move when the market does.
- Look for rate creep. Compare your rates today with those you signed up on. Small, quiet increases add up over a year of trading.
- Ask how quickly you are paid. Waiting several days for your own revenue hurts cash flow, especially with high street footfall under pressure. Next day settlement should be the standard, not a luxury.
- Get a second opinion from someone local. A face to face review costs you nothing but half an hour, and it gives you a clear benchmark.
Keeping more of every sale on the high street
The big banks planning a British payments system is a welcome signal, but independent traders in Saffron Walden, Chelmsford, Cambridge and Colchester cannot pay today's bills with tomorrow's infrastructure. The savings available right now come from understanding your current card payment fees and making sure you are on a fair, transparent deal. Across the businesses we review, our average saving is around 50%, and every one of those reviews starts with a simple look at the statements you already have.
If you would like to see where your money is going, book a free face to face card payments breakdown. We will sit down with you, go through your statements line by line and show you exactly what you are paying. You can also explore our card payment solutions or, if your till is due an upgrade, our integrated EPOS systems. Either way, it is a conversation over a coffee, not a sales pitch.
