A company that barely exists yet has started selling shares in how the UK will pay for things. Whether a startup can buy in, still remains an open question.
If you run an online shop, a subscription app, or a marketplace, there is a moment in every sale that you probably never think about. A customer taps pay, the money leaves their account, and a few seconds later it turns up in yours. In between all of that, it travels over rails you did not build, cannot see, and you have no say in it.
Those exact rails are about to be redesigned, and in September the people doing the work went looking for investors.
The company doing the redesign is DeliveryCo, formally the UK Payments Delivery Company, or UK PDC, and on 15th September, it opened an equity raise, inviting eligible organisations to become shareholders in the business that will build the next generation of UK retail payments infrastructure.
It is still early.
The company is still moving from mobilisation towards incorporation, so what is on offer is a stake in something that does not fully exist yet.
How a policy idea became a company
It started with the National Payments Vision, the Treasury’s hope for a payments system built on modern technology, where people and businesses have a real choice in how they pay.
HM Treasury, the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator, they all turned that hope into a strategy, and in July 2025 they split the job in two. The Retail Payments Infrastructure Board, chaired by the Bank of England, designs the system.
DeliveryCo, owned by the industry now builds it.
Nineteen organisations stepped forward after a call for funders in late 2025 to get DeliveryCo off the ground, they reportedly included the four largest high street banks alongside Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Nationwide, PayPal and Wise, and Visa and Mastercard are said to be involved as well.
Vim Maru, who is the chief executive of Barclays UK, is the chair-designate; there happens to be no permanent chief executive yet, and the board is still to be confirmed.
Why this became a national question
Around 95 per cent of UK card payments run over Visa or Mastercard, this is a figure from the Payment Systems Regulator that now turns up in almost every story on this subject. As cash use falls, that kind of dependence has started to look less like a quirk of the market and more like a potential risk.
When senior bankers met in February to begin planning a domestic alternative to the card networks, one executive put the stakes bluntly.
“…it would send us back to the 1950s.”— Executive familiar with the project, speaking to the Guardian, February 2026
The “rival to Visa and Mastercard” label is how much of the coverage describes the plan, but the design work is narrower than that. The Bank of England’s consultation, which builds on the National Payments Vision and closed on 11 September, focuses on the core clearing and messaging infrastructure, the plumbing underneath.
It does not set out to prescribe the products that will sit on top.
Where pay by bank comes in
The part we find most interesting for founders is the account-to-account payments, which moves money straight from a customer’s bank account to a merchant’s with no card in between, you might also hear this method called pay by bank.
The consultation names account-to-account payments at the point of sale as something the new system should support, and it asks for the design to work with other forms of digital money, including the digital pound.
Pay by bank already has a UK audience, which is now more than 15 million people and businesses use open banking, and a company called the UK Payments Initiative, formed by 31 firms,which exists to run a commercial scheme for recurring payments.
Pay.UK carries on running Faster Payments and Bacs in the meantime.
“…a real opportunity to transform the UK’s retail payments infrastructure.""—Victoria Cleland, Chair, Retail Payments Infrastructure Board
What India found out about owning the rails
If you want to see how this can go, India is the closest comparison we found.
UPI, its instant payments system, runs on rails operated by NPCI, a not-for-profit company set up by the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks’ Association.
In 2020, NPCI widened its shareholder base beyond the big banks to include payment banks, small finance banks and payment operators, which is exactly the kind of opening a UK founder might just hope for.
By volume, it worked, there are more than 23 billion UPI transactions in a single month this year, but the apps on top have now become concentrated.
PhonePe and Google Pay together handle more than 80 per cent of payments, NPCI also proposed a 30 per cent cap on any single app in 2020 and has pushed back enforcement ever since, most recently to the end of 2026.
Part of the reason is that enforcing it would mean turning customers away, as PhonePe’s chief executive has argued.
“…actively denying service to the end customer.”— Sameer Nigam, CEO, PhonePe
We keep thinking about this in relation to DeliveryCo.
Owning a share of the rails and having fair access to them turned out to be separate questions in India, and it is too soon to tell which one the UK will end up answering.
Brazil went the other way
Brazil took a different route with Pix, its the central bank that built and runs the rails, and then banks and fintechs plug in and build services on top.
Since its launch in November 2020, it has grown to almost 80 billion transactions in 2025. DeliveryCo is owned by the industry, which makes Pix a contrast more than a template, and it was built under a state mandate in a very different market setting.
Who gets into DeliveryCo?
This brings us back to the raise.
The call for initial funders last November required participants to hold a UK regulatory authorisation or be subject to UK regulatory oversight, and that is a test of status rather than size, so an authorised fintech could in principle qualify, the same document also said funders would have no automatic right to board seats or votes.
A report on the September raise describes similar criteria, with firms authorised or overseen by the FCA, the Prudential Regulation Authority or the Bank of England, plus a strategic connection to UK retail payments.
“…fostering an open and inclusive approach.”— Vim Maru, Chair-designate, DeliveryCo
The company is reportedly seeking around £50 million to fund its work to 2028, and the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board’s blueprint is expected in the first quarter of 2027.
Reports are now suggesting the new infrastructure could be running by around 2030, which is a long road for a founder deciding what to build on top of it.
We think the tension is structural, because a system meant to widen choice is being paid for by the organisations whose products it will sit beside.
What we’d still like to ask
Secondary research shows how DeliveryCo is put together, but it cannot say how it will treat the people who come late.
We would like to know what a small authorised fintech would pay and receive for a place among the shareholders, and whether equity can ever carry a say in how the system is run. We would also like to understand how pay by bank is expected to reach merchants once the infrastructure fully exists and who will finally set the access rules and the prices.
We would like to know how Pay.UK, the UK's New Payments Architecture work fits with the new model, and we’d also like to know how DeliveryCo will stop the few big players taking over, as what happened with India's app, and if the first shareholders are today's biggest names, what really happens to the National Payments Vision's promise of choice?
Editorial Note
This piece is purely based on secondary research.
We welcome additional context, corrections, or first-hand perspectives from anyone with relevant knowledge of the story.
Reach our editorial team at [email protected].
Also Read: As Palantir UK Government Contracts Faces Review, Who Is Left to Bid?
Sources: UK Finance, “UK Payments Delivery Company launches equity capital raise” (15 September 2026) and “Expression of Interest for initial funders of DeliveryCo” (November 2025); FinTech Futures (18 September 2026), citing Sky News; Bank of England, The National Payments Vision and RPIB consultation (25 June 2026); The Payments Association, “Establishing DeliveryCo: Call for Initial Funders”; Crowdfund Insider; FStech and Computing, citing the Guardian (February 2026); Open Banking Limited; Open Banking Expo; FStech; Inc42; TechCrunch; Electronic Payments International; IBS Intelligence; The Digital Banker; Central Banking; Pay.UK.
