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A bold new chapter for UK payments infrastructure: What’s next?

The UK is entering a bold new chapter in retail payments. There’s a long journey ahead, but the direction is right and the vision is strong. Now comes the challenge and opportunity — to deliver with purpose, pace and precision.

Payments are becoming the real-time intelligence layer of the digital economy and the organizations that move now will define what comes next. Banks, PSPs, merchants and infrastructure providers face a once-in-a-generation shift: always-on rails, richer ISO 20022 data, rising fraud, tighter regulation, and increasingly agentic customer experiences.

 

Thoughtworks partners with payments organizations to modernize core platforms, engineer resilient ecosystems, and apply AI safely at scale. We connect strategy to engineering reality, helping clients reduce operational complexity, improve authorisation rates, accelerate cross-border payments, and build the foundations for intelligent, 24/7 money movement.

 

We are defining the future of payments: multi-rail, always-on, agentic. Built on trust.

Rebuild the core

Build, run, rebuild, that cycle ends now. We deconstruct monolithic legacy hubs and rebuild the core into a composable, API-first platform that supports ISO 20022-ready payment capabilities integrated with thin ledgers that turn 24/7 real-time payments from a challenge into a scalable engine for growth.

Rewire for in-flow decisioning

Intelligence cannot scale when it is trapped behind silos and manual handoffs. We rewire for agents across operations, fraud, reconciliation, servicing, and engineering — building a unified intelligence layer powered by Payment Foundation Models, and providing the secure control plane needed for AI to act and automate safely at enterprise scale.

Reimagine payments

We create new payment experiences, products, and services- instant payouts, stablecoins, embedded finance, and agentic commerce- using our proven AI rapid implementation approach of aligning stakeholders in days, validating prototypes in weeks, and deploying MVPs to production in months. Turn payments into a secure, trustworthy, high-velocity engine for the next generation of digital business.

Capabilities

Why organizations choose Thoughtworks

We serve the full payments ecosystem

From retail and corporate banks to fintechs, merchants, payment processors, schemes, and infrastructure providers- we bring relevant, domain-specific expertise to every type of payments organization, at every stage of maturity.

 

We connect strategy to engineering reality and execute with strategic intent

We don't stop at recommendations. We align stakeholders in days, validate prototypes in weeks, and deploy production-ready MVPs in months- turning payments ambition into working software, fast.


We modernize without disruption

Whether decomposing a legacy payments hub or migrating to ISO 20022, we help organizations modernize progressively- improving speed, resilience, and data richness without putting live operations at risk.

 

We build for scale, reliability, and compliance

From 99.9% uptime for fintech startups to rebuilding digital payment platforms for 1.3 billion people, we engineer systems that are secure, always-on, and built to meet the most stringent regulatory standards.
 

We embed AI where it creates real value

From agentic fraud detection and real-time decisioning to intelligent reconciliation and payments orchestration, we apply AI safely and at scale- with the governance frameworks to match.

 

Industry partnerships and affiliations

Frequently asked questions

  • We work across the full spectrum of payments transformation, from modernizing legacy cores and orchestrating across rails and partners, to building intelligent operations, enhancing fraud detection, and unlocking the value of payments data and AI. Whether you're facing a specific bottleneck or undertaking a broader program, we help you identify where to start and how to move fast.

     

  • We help you build resilient, ISO 20022-ready, cloud-enabled and event-driven payment platforms that support real-time processing, richer data, lower cost and faster change. This includes payments hub design, legacy decomposition, progressive migration, and engineering excellence, so you modernize without disrupting what's already working.

  • Yes. We enable intelligent routing, multi-PSP connectivity, scheme integration and seamless payment experiences across digital, merchant, corporate and embedded channels. From account-to-account payments and wallets to API-first ecosystem design and partner connectivity, we help you orchestrate across the full payments landscape.

  • We help transform servicing, exception management, reconciliation, liquidity operations and incident response for a 24/7 payments world. Using AI, we automate exception and repair workflows, modernize reconciliation, improve observability, and reduce run costs, so your operations keep pace with real-time payments demands.

  • We embed advanced AI, graph intelligence and real-time decisioning to detect fraud, mule networks, synthetic identities and suspicious transaction patterns before losses materialize. Our approach includes graph neural networks, behavioral analytics, explainable AI for fraud operations, and compliance as code, giving your teams both the tools and the transparency to act with confidence.

  • As demonstrated in our work with Bosch, we specialize in building evolutionary data platforms. This means starting with a lean architecture that provides immediate value for green energy or operational efficiency, then scaling it incrementally to avoid the "big bang" failure of traditional data migrations.

     

  • We help you turn payments data into an enterprise intelligence asset, supporting fraud detection, routing optimization, reconciliation, client insights, liquidity forecasting and operational resilience. This includes building payments data platforms, transaction foundation models, knowledge graphs, real-time analytics and agentic workflows, alongside responsible AI and governance frameworks.

     

  • We offer an Agentic Payment Readiness assessment to identify where legacy architecture, process complexity and operating model constraints are slowing your transformation. From there, we can scope targeted engagements, whether that's a real-time payments readiness review, a fraud intelligence blueprint, an AI-enabled operations program, or an agentic commerce lab to explore what's next.

     

  • It's a structured exploration of how AI agents, wallets, payments orchestration and trusted identity could reshape commerce experiences for your business, helping you move from curiosity to conviction on agentic commerce opportunities.

     

  • We connect payments work directly to AI/works™, our agentic development platform for building and running industrial-grade systems in the AI era. This brings capabilities including reverse engineering, spec development, spec-to-code, developer experience, and control plane and runtime operations, so your payments transformation is built on a foundation that's ready for the AI-driven enterprise.

Learn how we can help you transform your payments experience