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On June 25, 2026, the Bank of England (the Bank) published a consultation paper on the design of the United Kingdom's next-generation retail payments infrastructure. The consultation, led by the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB), seeks stakeholder views on how a new core clearing and messaging infrastructure could support a wide range of payment journeys while achieving the strategic outcomes set out in the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC) Strategy. The RPIB proposes that the core infrastructure should support both existing payment journeys—including single immediate payments, batch payments, and recurring or scheduled payments—and new emerging journeys such as account-to-account payments at the point of sale (A2A at PoS), instant payments via aliases, programmable payments, and agentic payments. The infrastructure would also enable interoperability across different forms of digital money, including potential future forms such as a digital pound. The consultation identifies six design principles to guide infrastructure development: platform for innovation and competition, open access, common utilities and common standards, security and resilience, performance and scalability, and protection from fraud and wider financial crime. The RPIB proposes a layered conceptual architecture for the retail payments ecosystem, comprising end-user, access, product, core infrastructure, settlement, services, and scheme and standards layers. The consultation addresses cross-cutting issues including interoperability between different forms of money, settlement frequency and liquidity implications, consumer protection and fraud prevention, and enabling priority payment journeys such as A2A at PoS and cross-border payments. The consultation period closes on September 11, 2026. Responses can be submitted via web form, email to RetailPaymentsCPResponses2026@bankofengland.co.uk, or by post to the Bank of England.