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UK’s Pension and Welfare Agency is Considering Blockchain and DLT Technology

Recently the deputy director of digital payments and banking systems at the Department of Work and Pensions, Richard Laycock, has shared a blog post where he expressed his thoughts on the subject of changing payment systems. Within the blog, he said that the DWP is looking to transform its payments infrastructure. They want to move forward with the time and they understand that they need to be efficient, as well as, modern, fast, scalable, innovative, and most importantly, they understand that they need to be working 24/7. 

Richard highlights three main trends that he and the DWP are overlooking while they are actively working on payment service transformation. These trends include New Payments Architecture. “Forecasted to start implementation in 2021, a common payment message standard will be introduced, the existing schemes will be consolidated and new overlay services,” wrote he.

Also, Open Banking and DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) were mentioned as well. “The benefits include reducing time, cost and failure rate associated with making transactions whilst data is stored on a secure immutable ledger.”

Within the blog, Richard also mentioned the success that the department had made. They have already migrated the hosting of their core payments system from external suppliers to on-premises hosting. This helps them to manage and evolve their payments systems within the department.

“We have delivered some fairly significant change: introduced a new Faster Payment solution allowing for near real-time payments. And we have migrated our banking services to the new Government Banking Services,” noted Richard.

Let us also mention that other countries are working on related issues as well. For example, Coinspeaker has already reported earlier this month that, the United States Federal Reserve Board revealed their plans on releasing real-time payments and settlements services to boost the whole payment infrastructure. Reportedly announced to go live in 2023 or 2024, it’s going to be a new interbank real-time settlement system called FedNow, which will ultimately support faster payments within the country.

It looks like the payments industry is finally acknowledging blockchain technology and DLT system. Especially it has become clear when many of the leading industry companies have shared their plans on developing a new payments system. For example, SWIFT has announced that they are planning to launch a DLT system for global use. Also, Visa has introduced a new payment network for businesses to make transactions. 

UK’s Pension and Welfare Agency is Considering Blockchain and DLT Technology

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