According to UK Finance’s UK Payment Markets 2026, UK consumers and businesses made 49.7 billion payments in 2025, up 2% on the year, with cards taking the largest share at 64%.
This page is for merchants accepting UK payments and PSPs or payment companies entering the market who need to support the card, contactless, and mobile wallet methods that now dominate UK spending.
Meeting all regulatory requirements while actively building payment infrastructure is a heavy lift for PSPs or merchants that need to enter the market quickly. That is why many turn to white-label payment gateways and orchestration layers, such as Akurateco, to launch a fully branded platform faster, consolidate multiple payment connections into a single integration, and scale on shared connectivity, without having to develop and maintain the underlying stack themselves.
UK payments market: An overview
- Digital payments in the UK continue to dominate consumer spending: card payments accounted for 64% of all UK payments in 2025, and 65% of UK adults were registered for at least one mobile wallet, up from 57% in 2024 (UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2026).
- UK Open Banking payments reached 351 million transactions in 2025, a 57% year-on-year increase, with active users climbing past 15 million during the year (Open Banking Limited, 2025).
- Contactless payments, by card or mobile, rose 2% to 19.2 billion in 2025, representing 39% of all UK payments, up from just 3% a decade earlier (UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2026).
- Online sales made up 28.3% of total UK retail spending in December 2025, up from 28.0% the month before (Office for National Statistics, 2025).
The most popular payment methods in the UK
UK consumers and businesses prefer to pay and receive payments using debit and credit cards, digital wallets, Open Banking (Pay by Bank), Faster Payments, Bacs Direct Debit, and Buy Now, Pay Later, while a minority still use prepaid cards for setting spending limits or alternative methods such as cash or cryptocurrency.
Debit and credit cards
Most people in the UK reach for a debit or credit card first, whether at the supermarket till or at the online checkout. Visa and Mastercard run the networks behind nearly all of them. Debit cards, in particular, are valued for letting people spend only what’s already in their account, rather than borrowing as they would with a credit card. Over 100 million contactless debit cards have been issued, and cards accounted for the majority of all UK payments in 2025 (UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2026).
Digital wallets
Digital wallets store users’ payment details and allow them to make quick payments on their phones either by using fingerprint or facial recognition. Younger consumers were early adopters of digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, but the habit has since spread across the population. In 2025, 65% of UK adults were registered for at least one mobile wallet, up from 57% the year before. Nine in ten wallet users keep a debit card as their default payment method behind the wallet (UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2026).
Open Banking / Pay by Bank
Pay by Bank is the everyday name for Open Banking payments. The appeal lies in the simplicity of this method. A customer approves the payment right in their banking app. Cards and wallets still carry far more volume today, though Open Banking is now one of the UK’s fastest-growing payment rails, especially for bill payments and business transactions. Volumes hit 351 million transactions in 2025, up 57% year-on-year. Active users crossed 15 million over the same period (Open Banking Limited, 2025).
Faster Payments
Faster Payments is the near-instant transfer system built into most UK banking apps. It is now the country’s second most-used payment method after debit cards. Payments reached 6.2 billion in 2025, up 10% from the year before (UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2026). Everyday transfers, paying back a friend, splitting a bill, now mostly happen this way instead of in cash, and businesses now use it too for invoices and account-to-account settlements.
Bacs Direct Debit
Most UK households pay their rent, utilities, and subscriptions through Direct Debit, run by Pay.UK. Businesses can collect a set or variable amount on an agreed date, and payers are backed by the Direct Debit Guarantee. There were a record 5 billion transactions in 2025. 62% of merchants now accept Direct Debit and 94% of banks and fintechs offer it to customers (Pay.UK, 2025).
Buy Now, Pay Later
Buy Now, Pay Later providers such as Klarna, Clearpay and Zilch let shoppers split an online purchase into interest-free instalments at checkout. It has traditionally been popular with younger shoppers, but FCA data shows one in five UK adults, 10.9 million people, had used it by 2024 (FCA, 2024). The FCA began regulating BNPL for the first time in July 2026 (FCA, 2026).
Prepaid and alternative methods
In prepaid cards, money is loaded up front rather than pulled from a bank account, which is useful for setting a spending limit or giving allowances to children rather than as a primary payment method.
Cash still accounts for 8% of UK payments in 2025, down from 45% a decade ago, and is relied on daily by about 1.4 million people, or 3% of adults (UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2026). Cheques persist too, with Pay.UK’s Image Clearing System clearing 19.6 million of them in the last quarter of 2025 alone (Pay.UK, Q4 2025). Gift cards, store vouchers, and cryptocurrency round out the list. 8% of UK adults now hold crypto, though it is still mostly held as an investment rather than spent at checkout (FCA, Cryptoassets Consumer Research 2025).
Payment gateways in the UK
Merchants and PSPs in the UK typically choose from three types of payment infrastructure: global acquirers, specialist gateways, and UK-native providers.
Worldpay (now Global Payments)
Worldpay, originating in the UK, became part of Global Payments, a US company, in January 2026. This global acquirer now provides acquiring technology and merchant services, covering merchants of every size, from small shops to global enterprises.
GoCardless (now part of Mollie)
GoCardless, a specialist gateway, built its name as the UK’s largest direct debit provider, helping businesses collect recurring payments directly from customers’ bank accounts. Dutch payments company Mollie acquired GoCardless in September 2026, and the two are now integrating into a combined platform serving businesses across Europe.
Adyen
Adyen is a Netherlands-headquartered global acquirer known for offering acquiring, gateway, and risk management on a single unified platform. It primarily serves mid- to large-sized businesses, fast-growing enterprises, and global merchants.
Opayo (now Elavon)
Opayo, formerly Sage Pay, is a UK payment gateway now owned by Elavon, a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp. It mainly serves established UK SMBs and mid-market merchants with a trading history, particularly those already on Sage accounting software, rather than new or high-volume businesses.
Stripe
Stripe is a payments company dual-headquartered in the US and Ireland, known for its developer-friendly API and payments infrastructure. It combines gateway and acquiring capabilities to support online and in-person payments worldwide, serving everyone from early-stage startups to large public companies.
Checkout.com
Checkout.com is a London-headquartered payment platform that provides payment processing services and operates as a payment gateway, acquirer, and processor. Large enterprise merchants across e-commerce, travel, technology, retail, gaming, marketplaces, and crypto, with high transaction volumes, make up most of its customer base.
All of these payment gateways can be used via the Akurateco platform, which integrates with 700+ payment providers. If a specific provider is not already available, Akurateco can build a custom connection on request.
How to launch a payment business in the UK
To become a payment service provider in the UK, you need to get FCA authorisation to handle customer funds and choose the infrastructure to run on. While the first is a legal requirement you cannot avoid, the second is a cost and time-to-market question you actually get to control either by custom building or using a white-label platform.
FCA authorisation: API, SPI, and EMI
Anyone looking to start a payment company in the UK needs FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) authorisation before it can touch customer funds. The type of authorisation needed depends on transaction volume, the services offered, and whether the business issues e-money.
Firms with average monthly payment turnover under €3 million can register as a Small Payment Institution (SPI) under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (PSRs 2017). SPIs cannot offer payment initiation or account information services at any volume. Anyone above that threshold, or offering payment initiation services, needs full authorisation as an Authorised Payment Institution (API) instead, with no cap on volume. A firm offering only account information services can register more simply as a Registered Account Information Service Provider (RAISP).
A separate rule applies if the product issues electronic money: a stored balance, like a wallet or prepaid card, that other parties accept as payment. That requires Electronic Money Institution (EMI) authorisation under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, on top of or instead of PI status.
For a full breakdown of EMI requirements, capital thresholds and the application process, see our UK EMI licence guide.
Building a gateway vs using a white-label platform
Going independent means researching FCA requirements, securing the right authorisation (SPI, API or EMI), meeting PCI DSS standards, and then building, testing and certifying a payment system from scratch. It typically costs £350,000-£700,000+ and takes 12 months or more before going live.
A white-label platform replaces that build with a ready-made one instead. Partnering with an established provider like Akurateco gives you a pre-built, PCI DSS-certified gateway with 700+ of payment methods and acquirers already integrated, fully branded as your own. This cuts most of the cost and time out of launching, with new PSPs typically going live in as little as 5 business days. FCA authorisation is still yours to obtain either way, but white-label removes the burden of building and maintaining the infrastructure behind it, freeing you up to focus on growing the business instead.
Learn more about how a white-label solution for PSPs can help you launch faster.
How Akurateco supports payments in the UK
Akurateco gives PSPs and merchants access to UK payment methods, banks, and acquirers through its library of 700+ connectors. Instead of building and maintaining a separate connection for each one, a business can add or switch providers without extra development work.
Built-in routing sends each transaction to whichever connected provider is currently performing best for that specific combination of traits, such as the card’s BIN range, the transaction value, and recent conversion performance. Cascading can retry a soft decline through another configured provider instead of ending the attempt there. The on-premises deployment option is available for institutions with data-residency requirements.
Akurateco in the UK
The Akurateco team takes part in major UK industry events, including Pay360, iGB L!VE, London Tech Week, and ICE London, where we hold meaningful conversations with the PSPs, acquirers, and merchants actually running UK payment operations about what’s changing in routing, regulation, and provider performance.
FAQs
What is the most popular payment method in the UK?
Debit and credit cards are the UK’s most popular payment methods. Cards accounted for the majority of all UK payments in 2025, according to UK Finance’s Payment Markets Report. Debit cards lead the way, valued for drawing only on money already in the account rather than borrowing, with over 100 million now issued as contactless.
Which payment gateway is best in the UK?
There’s no single best payment gateway in the UK. The right one depends on your business size, transaction volume, and whether you need card acceptance or recurring billing support. Compare providers on pricing, approval rates, settlement speed, and support for UK-specific methods relevant to UK consumers.
How can merchants accept UK payment methods?
Merchants accept UK payment methods via a payment gateway or acquirer that supports the payment methods their customers actually use (debit and credit cards, digital wallets, Direct Debit, and Open Banking). Rather than integrating each method separately, most merchants connect through a single gateway that routes transactions to the right provider.
Do I need an FCA licence to start a payment business in the UK?
Any UK payment business needs FCA authorisation before it can handle customer funds. If you are under €3 million in average monthly turnover, you can register as a Small Payment Institution. If you are a larger provider or one offering payment initiation and account information services, you need full Authorised Payment Institution status instead. Products issuing electronic money, such as wallets or prepaid balances, need separate Electronic Money Institution authorisation.
Does Akurateco support UK payment methods?
Akurateco provides access to UK payment methods, banks, and acquirers through a single integration within its library of 700+ connectors. If a specific gateway is not already available, you can request a custom connection, which can be ready in as little as 10-20 business days.
