Pay.UK

Pay.UK Limited is the recognised operator and standards body for the United Kingdom's interbank retail payment systems. It runs the domestic rails that move most of the money in the UK economy: Bacs (batch Direct Debit and Direct Credit), the Faster Payment System (24/7 real-time account-to-account payments), and the Image Clearing System for cheques, alongside the Current Account Switch Service. On top of the rails it owns industry overlay services including Confirmation of Payee (the API-based account name-checking service that fights Authorised Push Payment fraud) and Request to Pay, and through its Standards Authority it defines UK payments standards and the ISO 20022 migration underpinning the New Payments Architecture. Pay.UK is a scheme and standards operator, not a self-serve API platform: it publishes rulebooks, participation requirements, and ISO 20022 message specifications rather than an open public API, and its technical standards are distributed through the gated Standards Source and Faster Payment System Standards Library portals (single-login, registration required). Confirmation of Payee is a documented, API-based peer-to-peer scheme that participants and approved vendors implement against Pay.UK's technical standards. Home market is the United Kingdom.

Pay.UK is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Payments, United Kingdom, Real-Time Payments, ISO 20022, and Account-to-Account.

Pay.UK’s developer surface includes documentation, getting-started guide, engineering blog, support, and 10 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub

19.3/100 emerging ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0

0 APIs

Payments United Kingdom Real-Time Payments ISO 20022 Account-to-Account Faster Payments Direct DebitPayment SchemeStandards Body Confirmation of Payee

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0

Composite quality — 19.3/100 · emerging

Contract Quality 0.0 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 4.9 / 17

Access Clarity 3.6 / 17

Operational Transparency 0.0 / 11

Contract Governance 1.9 / 10

Discoverability 4.9 / 9

Regulatory Posture 6.3 / 15

Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Payments regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/pay-uk: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Pay Uk Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · DMARC

SECURITY

Resources

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

LLMsTxt

LLMsTxt

Design & Contract 1

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conformance

Conformance

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

StandardsLibrary

StandardsLibrary

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Support

Support

Contact

Contact

Commercial 2

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

TermsOfService

TermsOfService

PrivacyPolicy

PrivacyPolicy

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Blog

Blog

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Standards

Standards

StandardsSource

StandardsSource

Source (apis.yml)

aid: pay-uk
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/pay-uk/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
name: Pay.UK
kind: company
description: 'Pay.UK Limited is the recognised operator and standards body for the United Kingdom''s interbank retail payment
  systems. It runs the domestic rails that move most of the money in the UK economy: Bacs (batch Direct Debit and Direct Credit),
  the Faster Payment System (24/7 real-time account-to-account payments), and the Image Clearing System for cheques, alongside
  the Current Account Switch Service. On top of the rails it owns industry overlay services including Confirmation of Payee
  (the API-based account name-checking service that fights Authorised Push Payment fraud) and Request to Pay, and through
  its Standards Authority it defines UK payments standards and the ISO 20022 migration underpinning the New Payments Architecture.
  Pay.UK is a scheme and standards operator, not a self-serve API platform: it publishes rulebooks, participation requirements,
  and ISO 20022 message specifications rather than an open public API, and its technical standards are distributed through
  the gated Standards Source and Faster Payment System Standards Library portals (single-login, registration required). Confirmation
  of Payee is a documented, API-based peer-to-peer scheme that participants and approved vendors implement against Pay.UK''s
  technical standards. Home market is the United Kingdom.'
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: false
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source:
  - security
  generated: '2026-09-02'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg
tags:
- Payments
- United Kingdom
- Real-Time Payments
- ISO 20022
- Account-to-Account
- Faster Payments
- Direct Debit
- Payment Scheme
- Standards Body
- Confirmation of Payee
created: '2026-07-24'
modified: '2026-07-25'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis: []
common:
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/pay-uk-domain-security.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/
- type: Documentation
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/
- type: Standards
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/standards-authority/
- type: StandardsLibrary
  url: https://www.standardssource.com/fps
- type: StandardsSource
  url: https://www.standardssource.com/stn
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/payment-systems/access-to-payment-systems/getting-started/
- type: Blog
  url: https://newseventsinsights.wearepay.uk/
- type: Support
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/contact-us/
- type: TermsOfService
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/legal/
- type: PrivacyPolicy
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/privacy/
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/pay-uk-conformance.yml
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/pay-uk-llms.txt
- type: Contact
  url: https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/overlay-services/confirmation-of-payee/
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com

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