The UK's payments industry trade association has announced that The Access Bank UK has signed up to become a full member. What are the implications of this, in particular for corporate treasury?

According to Payments UK, its members represent a wide spectrum of payment service providers from across the industry and The Access Bank UK Ltd is no exception. While its parent company is incorporated in Nigeria, the UK division was established in the UK to provide customers in both the UK and Africa with a broad range of business and personal banking services such as trade finance, treasury services, business and personal banking and wealth management.

It is the most recent of 11 new members to have signed up to join Payments UK since the association was newly established last year, bringing membership numbers to 42 full members and 27 associate members.

Chief executive of Payments UK, Maurice Cleaves, said: “It is a very exciting time for both new and existing players in the payments industry... Payments UK sits at the centre of the payments landscape and we are uniquely placed to bring the payments community together to discuss and manage change.”

Payments UK represents the voice of Britain's payments industry and works with stakeholders to share payments knowledge and expertise. Some of its main roles are to deliver change and innovation with its members and other payments stakeholders and to support some of the leadership initiatives such as Paym, the Current Account Switch Service and Faster Payments.

Do payments need to get 'social'?

So far, Payments UK has worked on projects that support mainstream payment systems but fintech disruption could change the playing field. 'Social payments', using social media such as Facebook or Twitter – as outlined in yesterday's article on fastacash – have the potential to revolutionise the payments industry. Fastacash pitches itself as an intermediator between banks and social media platform users and, as such, it will still rely on payments infrastructure, such as VocaLink in the UK, but interfaces will be brought straight to the customer's social media applications (for smartphone or computer), rather than the consumer having to log into an online banking site or app to initiate a payment.

Payments UK is expanding its membership to include non-traditional members – and the announcement regarding The Access Bank UK shows that reach is growing outside the UK, bearing in mind that Sub-Saharan Africa is an important market for mobile banking innovation (such as mpesa in Kenya) and would surely be receptive to social media payments. There is considerable scope here for the payments industry to understand the opportunities and to bring real benefits not just to consumers but also to companies seeking to expand their business into new markets – but who wish to also retain some of the security and reliability of payments in their own domestic market.

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CTMfile Take: The potential for social media payments is huge but innovation in this field seems to be left to startups such as fastacash. It would be great to see industry bodies get on board in really taking payments forward to the next generation, as this would open up markets for companies too. We'd certainly 'like' it if they did!