A2A Payments Go Mainstream: UK Forward Plan, $850B e-Commerce, and Enterprise Strategy

The $850 Billion Shift Nobody on the Card Side Wanted to See

For three decades, card networks were the default infrastructure for digital commerce. That default is cracking. According to FIS Global’s payments intelligence report, account-to-account (A2A) payments — transactions that move money directly between bank accounts without touching a card network — represented approximately $525 billion in global e-commerce value in 2022. By 2026, that figure is projected to reach nearly $850 billion, a 13% compound annual growth rate.

This is not a niche FinTech story. It is a structural realignment of the global payment stack, and it is accelerating simultaneously on three fronts: regulatory mandates (led by the UK), real-time infrastructure (led by Brazil and India), and enterprise cost pressure (which is universal).

Understanding why A2A is accelerating — and where the friction points remain — is now a strategic competency for any CFO, treasurer, or payments technology lead.

The UK Payments Forward Plan: From Ambition to Statute

On 26 February 2026, HM Treasury published the UK Payments Forward Plan — a joint regulatory roadmap produced by HM Treasury, the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR). It is a 3-year blueprint explicitly framing A2A as a genuine alternative to card payments, not an edge-case channel.

The plan’s most consequential commitment is the rollout of Commercial Variable Recurring Payments (cVRP). Unlike existing single-payment open banking flows, cVRP allows a merchant to initiate payments of varying amounts with a single, persistent user consent — effectively replicating the convenience of a direct debit while settling on Faster Payments rails in real time. The first live cVRP transactions under the industry-led UK Payments Initiative (UKPI) scheme were scheduled for Q1 2026 (Wave 1), targeting regulated sectors including utilities, rail, government services, charities, and financial services. Wave 2 — covering e-commerce — is expected by end of 2026.

Several regulatory moves underpin this trajectory:

• Q2 2026: HM Treasury consultation on payment services law, explicitly covering its approach to open banking and cVRP monetisation
• Q3 2026: FCA consultation on the Long-Term Regulatory Framework interface rules (the rulebook that governs how banks must expose data and payment initiation to third parties)
• Q4 2026: A new Statutory Instrument under the Data (Use and Access) Act will be laid before Parliament, granting the FCA formal powers to oversee open banking including commercial schemes
• Q1 2027: FCA policy statement, providing the durable regulatory framework the industry has been waiting for since the original Open Banking Implementation Entity launched in 2018

Importantly, the Forward Plan also confirms that the PSR will be abolished, with its functions consolidated into the FCA. This removes a long-standing dual-regulator friction point that slowed cVRP negotiations between banks and FinTechs for three years.

Global Markets Already Running: Pix, UPI, and the A2A Leaders

While the UK is legislating A2A into mainstream status, several markets are already living there. FIS Global’s analysis identifies Finland, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Thailand, and Poland as leading A2A adoption nations — markets where real-time bank-to-bank payment rails have displaced significant card volume in e-commerce.

Brazil’s Pix is the most-cited benchmark. Launched in November 2020 by the Central Bank of Brazil, Pix grew person-to-business (P2B) transactions by 209% between October 2021 and October 2022 — from 152 billion to 472 billion transactions across that period. Pix’s e-commerce market share doubled in one year, reaching 24% of all e-commerce transaction value by 2022. By 2026, Pix is on track to approach eight billion monthly transactions, with P2B payments accounting for an estimated 48% of its volume by mid-year. The critical design decision was mandatory participation: the Central Bank required every regulated Brazilian financial institution to implement Pix, removing the network bootstrapping problem that kills most new payment schemes.

India’s UPI tells a similar story at even larger scale. As of 2022, UPI already captured 50% of India’s total e-commerce transaction value — a figure that reflects near-ubiquitous merchant acceptance, deep smartphone penetration, and regulatory architecture that made UPI essentially free to merchants. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) designed UPI on an interoperable, open-API model that allowed competitive private-sector wallets (PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm) to compete for users while sharing the same rail.

Peru illustrates the growth trajectory at an earlier stage: Yape and PLIN together held 17% of e-commerce value in 2022, up from 9% in 2021, with projections reaching 28% by 2026.

The common thread across these leaders: government-mandated or government-backed interoperability, real-time settlement, and zero or near-zero merchant fees at launch. The UK’s cVRP rollout shares the first and third characteristics; the Forward Plan’s stablecoin and FedNow-equivalent infrastructure work addresses the second.

The Cost Case: Why Enterprises Are Watching the Rail, Not Just the Rate

The enterprise argument for A2A adoption is straightforward in structure even if the exact numbers vary by market. Card payments carry a layered fee stack: interchange (paid to the card-issuing bank), scheme fees (paid to Visa or Mastercard), acquirer margin, and gateway fees. For a typical mid-market e-commerce merchant, this stack runs between 1.5% and 3.5% of each transaction value. A2A payments, settled over Faster Payments (UK), Pix (Brazil), or UPI (India), strip out the interchange and scheme layers entirely.

SwipeSum’s 2025 analysis quantifies the differential: A2A transaction volumes are projected to grow from 60 billion globally in 2024 to 186 billion by 2029 — a 209% increase — precisely because the merchant cost case compounds at scale. For a business processing $10 million per month in card transactions at a blended rate of 2.2%, eliminating the interchange and scheme layers and replacing them with flat-fee A2A rails can reduce payment processing costs by 30% or more. On high-value B2B flows — invoices, trade settlements, insurance disbursements — the absolute savings are larger still, because percentage-based card fees become punitive above certain transaction sizes.

The fraud economics also favor A2A: card fraud losses exceed $24 billion annually globally, and chargebacks impose additional operational costs on merchants that A2A’s push-payment architecture eliminates by design. With push payments, the consumer authorises each transaction — there is no card-on-file to compromise, no “card-not-present” fraud vector.

What Payments Teams Should Do

1. Audit your payment mix for A2A substitution opportunities before the regulatory window forces the issue

The UK’s cVRP Wave 2 timeline means that by end of 2026, e-commerce merchants will have a live, FCA-sanctioned A2A option for recurring and subscription payments. Waiting for full regulatory clarity before running an internal audit is the wrong sequencing. Start now by mapping which of your payment flows are structural candidates: subscriptions and SaaS billing (VRP’s sweet spot), B2B invoice settlement (high value, low fraud risk, strong A2A economics), and insurance disbursements and refunds (push-payment architecture is inherently more consumer-friendly here). Build the business case before the infrastructure is live, not after.

2. Negotiate bank API access and connectivity now — cVRP capacity will be oversubscribed at launch

The UK’s cVRP rollout follows an industry scheme model, meaning banks and FinTechs are participants in a managed ecosystem. Wave 1 capacity is finite and prioritised for regulated sectors. If your use case is Wave 2 (e-commerce), your connectivity options run through open banking intermediaries — companies like Token.io, Yapily, or TrueLayer — who aggregate API access across multiple banks. Waiting until Q4 2026 to begin vendor conversations means competing for scarce capacity. Start vendor due diligence now, with emphasis on bank coverage (which institutions are in the scheme), SLA guarantees, and fallback handling for declined A2A initiations.

3. Re-architect your risk model for push-payment settlement finality

A2A settlement is final and irrevocable in ways that card transactions are not. This is both a strength (no chargebacks) and a new operational risk class (no dispute mechanism equivalent to card scheme chargebacks). Before switching payment flows to A2A rails, payments teams need to redesign their fraud rules, their customer dispute workflows, and their reconciliation logic. The risk is not higher than cards in aggregate — A2A fraud rates are substantially lower — but it is different, and legacy risk frameworks designed around card chargeback windows will break in an A2A environment. Build the new risk model before the first high-value A2A transaction, not after the first dispute.

What the Laggards Are Missing

The countries and enterprises not yet engaging with A2A tend to share a misread of the competitive timeline. They see A2A as a technology story (“we’ll evaluate when it’s more mature”) when it is actually a cost and regulatory story (“the economics are already better, and the regulation is now mandating adoption”).

The FIS projection of $850 billion in A2A e-commerce by 2026 is not a technology-adoption curve — it is primarily a regulatory and infrastructure curve. Brazil’s Pix didn’t grow because consumers discovered a better UX; it grew because the Central Bank mandated bank participation and made the service free. The UK’s Forward Plan is doing the analogous thing for the British market, more gradually, but with the same structural intent.

For enterprises, the strategic window is the next 12-18 months: before cVRP Wave 2 goes live, before the FCA’s Long-Term Regulatory Framework is finalised, and before bank APIs are saturated with early adopters. The businesses that run A2A pilots now will have operational learning, negotiated commercial terms, and risk frameworks in place when volume-scale adoption begins. Those that wait for the wave will be building while their competitors are already riding it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• The Dramatic Global Rise of A2A Payments — FIS Global
• UK Payments Forward Plan — UK Government (GOV.UK)
• UK ‘Payments Forward Plan’ lays out 2026-2028 roadmap — Global Government Finance
• A2A Payments: The 2025 Comprehensive Guide for Businesses — SwipeSum
• The Role of US Open Banking in Catalysing A2A Payments — McKinsey
• Open Banking and the Payments Forward Plan — Red Compass Labs
• UK’s First A2A cVRP Transaction Completed by Visa and Partners — The Paypers