UK Schemes

The Faster Payments Service (FPS) is an electronic payment system in the UK that allows funds between banks. It was launched in the United Kingdom in 2008 to reduce the time it usually takes to transfer funds between bank accounts from three working days to typically a few seconds (sometimes, depending on the bank of destination, it can take up to 2 hours).

This service joins the other two popular transfer methods in the UK: BACS and CHAPS.

BACS transfers (Bankers’ Automated Clearing Services), introduced in 1968, are typically used by individuals and small businesses.
CHAPS transfers (Clearing House Automated Payment System), introduced in 1984, is a same-day payment system for transferring large sums of money, usually by businesses and other organizations.

Characteristics of the schemes

Let’s see the main characteristics of the three schemes that will be useful to know:

	BACS	CHAPS	Faster payments
Availability	24/7	Working days	24/7
Max. execution time	3 working days	Same day (if the payment is done before 5 pm.)	Often seconds, (sometimes 2 hours, depending on the bank)
Max. limit for a transfer amount	£20 million	No limit	£250,000
The minimum limit for a transfer amount	No specific	More than £10,000	No specific
Limit of remittance characters	18 characters	140 characters	140 characters
Feedback on the operation	3 days	Between 12/48 hours	15 seconds
Errors information	Lack of information about the cause	Lack of information about the cause	Specific causes, allowing for remediation

Faster Payments Adherence

Here you have the banks participants in the Faster Payment System:

Atom bank
Banking Circle
Barclays Bank plc
Barclays Bank UK plc
Cashplus Bank
Citibank NA
ClearBank®
Clydesdale Bank plc
CreDec
Ebury
Elavon
Equals Money
Goldman Sachs
HSBC Bank plc
HSBC UK Bank plc
iFast Global Bank Limited
JPMorgan Chase & Co
LHV
Lloyds Bank plc
Metro Bank
Mettle
Modulr
Monzo Bank Limited
Nationwide Building Society
NatWest
Northern Bank Limited t/a Danske Bank
PayrNet
PPS
Prepaid Financial Services
Revolut Limited
Santander
Square
Starling Bank
Tesco Bank
The Access Bank UK
The Bank of London
The Co-operative Bank
TSB
Turkish Bank UK
Virgin Money
Wise

How Devengo API uses UK schemes

With the purpose to deliver money as fast as possible, our API is designed to take advantage of the Faster Payments scheme wherever possible.

If some bank of destination is not a Faster Payment participant or the amount of the payment that you want to send is bigger than £100,000, our system will automatically send the money through BACS.