Payments UK, the recently launched trade association for the UK's growing payments industry, has published its initial report on its World Class Payments project. The report sets out the association's vision of the enhancements that would ensure that payments in the UK continue to be world class.

In particular it identifies four areas that should be prioritised:

1. Access to the payments infrastructure for those who offer payments to customers.
2. Confirmation of payee before making a payment.
3. More control over outgoing payments for customers. This will pave the way for greater efficiencies in e-invoicing and reconciliation capabilities for small businesses and larger corporates.
4. Enhanced data, enabling more and better information to be linked to payments. This will be of particular benefit to corporates, by making it possible to provide additional reference information with an electronic payment, thus facilitating reconciliation.

The report looked at the changes that would benefit consumers, businesses, charities, the public sector and the payments industry. It found that larger businesses primarily want a simplified process for making and receiving payments, in order to increase efficiency. Corporates called for the following enhancements:

• the ability to make and receive payments whenever they want, with as much data as needed, with ease and efficiency across multiple providers;
• clear and simple rules allowing them, if they wish, to give controlled third party access to their payment accounts;
• payment options that are straightforward, secure and predictable allowing for effective management of cash flow;
• ability to validate who they are paying, and what it costs before sending a payment; ability to reconcile payments received; ability to resolve issues easily and with equitable protections;
• common (standardised) ways of instructing and reporting payments to increase interoperability, efficiency and ease of switching; and
• sufficient notice about changes to the payments landscape so they can plan effectively – for themselves and their customers.

Ahead of Payments UK's World Class Payments report, the association commissioned research from Consult Hyperion, an electronic transaction consultancy, on The Future of Payments. This opinion paper sets out a vision of what payments of tomorrow could look like, built on all types of customers’ needs.

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CTMfile take: Greater control over outgoing payments and the ability to link more and better information will pave the way for more efficiency in e-invoicing and reconciliation, which is very much what corporates need. However, they need this sooner rather than later and UK Payments doesn't provide a timeline or practical proposals of how it will achieve these enhancements.