PSR: ‘Banks should sell share of VocaLink’

A hard-hitting report by the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) has suggested that banks should sell part of their stake in the UK’s payments infrastructure to help increase innovation and competition. The report features the provisional findings of the PSR’s market review into the ownership and competitiveness of the infrastructure that supports the UK’s payments systems: Bacs, the Faster Payments scheme and LINK. These payment systems are currently owned by a relatively small number of banks, which also control the single infrastructure provider that they rely on to process payments – VocaLink.