UK banks and payment firms start a £50m equity raise to capitalise the Payments Delivery Company through 2028

Nineteen financial services groups have launched a raise of around £50m of initial equity capital for the UK Payments Delivery Company, the industry-owned vehicle set up under the Bank of England's model to build the next generation of UK retail payments infrastructure, which trades as DeliveryCo. The participants reported include the four largest UK banks, Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest and HSBC, alongside Wise, PayPal, JP Morgan, Mastercard and Visa.

Vim Maru, chief executive of Barclays UK, is chair designate and the company is searching for a permanent chief executive. The capital is intended to fund the company's operations until 2028. To join the group, a firm has to be authorised, regulated or overseen by the FCA, the PRA or the Bank of England for banking or payment activities, hold a strategic connection to the UK retail payments system, and consider an equity investment in the company.

The immediate remit is resilient infrastructure for the UK's future account-to-account payments, under the Treasury's National Payments Vision and the oversight of the Bank of England's Retail Payments Infrastructure Board, which is expected to deliver its first formal blueprint for the programme in the first quarter of 2027.

The UK has been trying to renew its interbank retail rails since the New Payments Architecture was first scoped, and the programme's repeated failure has been a governance problem rather than a technical one: no entity owned the delivery. Capitalising a company, with a chair, a balance sheet and a funding horizon, is the first structural answer to that, and the size of the cheque says what stage it is at - £50m funds an organisation to a blueprint, not an infrastructure build.

The participant list is the more interesting fact. Mastercard and Visa are inside a vehicle whose stated purpose is account-to-account infrastructure that reporting frames as a potential domestic alternative to them, which is either the schemes buying a seat at the table where the rail that competes with them gets specified, or a signal that the industry does not expect the rail to compete with cards at the point of sale at all.

Which of those it is will show up in the RPIB blueprint, not in the raise. For acceptance specifically, nothing changes yet: this is infrastructure governance, and no merchant, acquirer or PSP has a new rail to sell or integrate until the design lands.

• Whether the raise closes at £50m and which of the nineteen groups actually write cheques, since participation in the foundation work and an equity investment are different commitments
• Who is appointed permanent chief executive and from where
• Whether the RPIB blueprint in the first quarter of 2027 scopes the infrastructure at merchant point of sale or confines it to interbank and account-to-account transfers
• Whether the acquiring side, largely absent from the reported participant list, is brought in before the design is fixed

• cityam.com
• DeliveryCo, the company's own description of its remit
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