Mastercard is set to provide UK banks and financial institutions with a groundbreaking platform to innovate and test account-to-account (A2A) instant payments technology.

Later this year, the company will open access to its fifth-generation A2A instant payments sandbox, designed to foster collaboration and modernise the UK’s payment ecosystem.

The sandbox environment will enable experimentation with new payment flows, including retail and digital assets, across various use cases. It aims to support the development of advanced services such as the “5-leg credit transfer” with instant payment confirmation, enhancing merchant and consumer payment options.

Adhering to the international ISO20022 standards, the sandbox will offer significant improvements in transaction data richness. This advancement is expected to boost fraud detection capabilities and pave the way for future innovations in the payment sector.

The UK government’s National Payments Vision (NPV), published at the end of last year, sets ambitious goals for the payment sector’s contribution to economic growth. Mastercard’s A2A sandbox aligns with this vision, providing a platform for banks and fintechs to prepare for the next phase of the UK’s payment evolution.

An EY report from March 2025 highlighted the potential for a £9bn annual uplift to the UK’s GDP through the modernisation of A2A infrastructure. The sandbox represents a critical step in unlocking this growth, serving as a testing ground for new infrastructure capabilities and products.

Mastercard’s Next Generation A2A Instant Payment platform underpins the sandbox, offering a cloud-ready solution with user-friendly front-end tools and a developer portal, as well as robust back-end functionality with API access for easy integration.

Mastercard Real Time Payments executive vice president Peter Reynolds said: “Account-to-account payments in the UK are already an enormous part of the UK’s financial landscape. The Mastercard A2A instant payments Sandbox opens our innovative technology to our partners to develop and test new potential services. Alongside the UK government’s National Payments Vision, we’re setting out a bold vision of the future in A2A real-time payments.”

The sandbox was showcased at UK Finance’s Digital Innovation Summit on 24 June, emphasising its role in accelerating retail payments.

In September 2024, Mastercard updated its Consumer Fraud Risk (CFR) solution to increase the ways it helps protect consumers from Real Time Payment scams. The AI-powered insights give more UK banks greater visibility into potentially fraudulent transactions so they can stop scams before they take place.