With just a few days to go until the launch of the new Faster Payments Service, Apacs, the UK payments association, has today (22nd May 2008) issued new materials to help customers wishing to benefit from the service, as it begins its rollout on 27th May.
APACS has produced a new, downloadable advice guide, How to use the Faster Payments Service, along with an online easy-to-use sort code checker canipayfaster.co.uk. Customers can input any UK sort code to check whether it is able to receive Faster Payments. More sort codes will be added over the next few months as the service is rolled out. All these materials are available from apacs.org.uk.
In readiness for the launch of the new service on 27th May, over the last week participating members of the new Faster Payments Service have been making live transactions through the new infrastructure, sending and receiving payments in pennies. This final stage of testing comes at the end of extensive testing in a non-live environment.
Paul Smee, APACS Chief Executive says, "The final part of this enormously complex project has been to test the new system in a live environment. This week hundreds of penny payments have successfully been made between the participating banks. The Service is now ready to start being rolled out to customers next Tuesday. Although the initial rollout will be gradual, and some customers may not be using the new service immediately, we expect that in the coming months this will ramp up to enable large numbers of customers to benefit from it. After such substantial investment by the industry we'd like, in time, to see the new Faster Payments Service being used for all of the UK's internet, phone and standing order payments."
The Faster Payments Service will be introduced in a phased rollout, with founding banks gradually implementing their own plans to deliver the service to their customers. Customers will be informed by their banks when they are able to use the service.