The Payments Paddock Episode 3 - 22nd May 2026: CHAPS 24/7, Fed Fintech Access & Luxury Checkout Fails

Episode 3 covers the Bank of England's CHAPS 24/7 consultation, Trump's push to open Fed rails to fintechs, and why luxury brands keep getting checkout wrong.

Key takeaways

• The Bank of England's CHAPS 24/7 consultation is positive, but the proposed 22×6 model falls short of true round-the-clock operation — watch the timeline for bank holiday coverage.
• Trump's push to grant fintechs direct Fed access could reduce costs for US payment businesses and may ease the path for UK and European fintechs expanding into America.
• The US payments market is structurally fragmented: community banks and limited ACH adoption are barriers that technology alone cannot solve without correspondent bank participation.
• Luxury and high-value retailers are losing sales at checkout — mobile-unfriendly, redirect-heavy flows are a direct revenue leak that finance and ops leaders should test and fix.
• Account-to-account open banking payments are a practical alternative to card processing for high-value or invoice-based transactions in travel, education, and retail.
• Expense management is a high-impact area for cost control — businesses without an integrated spend platform are leaving money and management time on the table.

Bank of England Floats 24/7 CHAPS — But Is It Enough?

The Bank of England has opened a consultation on moving CHAPS — the UK's high-value payment system — to round-the-clock operation. The current proposal is 22 hours a day, six days a week, which stops short of true 24/7 availability. Craig and Al both read that as a reactive move: rival payment rails and instant-payment expectations have raised the bar, and CHAPS risks looking dated if it doesn't keep pace.

For anyone who has bought or sold a house, the pain point is familiar. CHAPS is the mechanism most conveyancers use to transfer completion funds, and cut-off times create genuine anxiety — particularly around bank holidays or late-evening completions. Extending operating hours would directly reduce that risk for the thousands of property transactions that depend on it every year.

The hosts are clear that CHAPS remains expensive relative to Faster Payments, and that the two systems run on different rails with different value caps. Faster Payments handles most everyday transfers; CHAPS is reserved for high-value, time-critical flows where certainty matters more than cost. The consultation outcome will determine how quickly the Bank moves and how much pressure it relieves on businesses that currently plan around cut-off windows.

Trump Pushes the Fed to Open Payment Rails to Fintechs

The Trump administration has asked the Federal Reserve to explore giving non-bank payment providers — fintechs, PSPs, and crypto exchanges — direct access to Fed infrastructure such as FedNow and the ACH network. At present, those businesses must route through a sponsoring bank, which adds cost, slows growth, and concentrates power in a small number of tier-one institutions willing to take on the associated risk.

Kraken, the crypto exchange, was specifically cited in the reporting. Craig and Al noted this is consistent with the administration's broader pro-crypto posture: if crypto businesses can settle directly via the Fed, the banks that currently act as gatekeepers lose a lucrative and strategically important role — though they may also shed some of the compliance burden that comes with it.

The incoming Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, inherits this agenda alongside an economy showing record corporate earnings, equity indices near all-time highs, and unresolved trade tensions. Al and Craig are sceptical that the proposal will move quickly into concrete policy, but they agree the direction of travel is right. If successful, the practical effect would be to lower the barrier for UK and European fintechs — Revolut, Wise, and others — trying to crack the US market.

Why the US Payments Landscape Is Still Playing Catch-Up

The hosts draw on direct experience to illustrate the gap. Even five or six years ago, moving a six-figure sum from a US community bank to a correspondent account in New York required a client to visit a physical branch and sign paper forms. The technology existed on the fintech side; the problem was that the underlying bank couldn't match it.

That dynamic explains why paper cheques still account for a meaningful share of US business payments and why instant bank transfers remain far less embedded than in the UK or Europe. Opening the rails to fintechs matters, but only if the end customer's bank can also participate in the resulting flows.

Luxury Brands Are Losing Sales at the Checkout

The third topic comes from a community blog post: the persistent mismatch between the brand experience a luxury retailer promises and the checkout experience it actually delivers. The example cited is a customer browsing a £3,000 Gucci item who is then redirected to an unfamiliar crypto payment page, breaking the continuity of the purchase journey entirely.

The rule of thumb from the discussion is blunt: if the checkout redirects to an unfamiliar page or requires the customer to re-enter their card details, the sale is gone — especially on mobile. Al shared a personal example of abandoning a purchase from a well-known UK children's clothing brand because the mobile checkout required manual card entry. He was so surprised that he initially wondered whether he had landed on a phishing site.

For high-value transactions — four or five figures — the hosted card checkout is rarely sufficient on its own. Account-to-account payments via open banking provide an important alternative, particularly for travel companies and educational providers issuing invoices. Klarna's in-store QR code approach is highlighted as a practical solution: sales staff handle price objections in the moment, allowing customers to set up a 12-month payment plan there and then rather than going home and succumbing to buyer's remorse.

The broader point for finance and operations leaders is that checkout should be tested regularly, end-to-end, on the devices your customers actually use. If the majority of your traffic comes through Instagram on a mobile, that is where your checkout experience needs to be flawless.

Expense Management: The Hidden Cost Control Lever

Before the main news items, Al noted a clear theme from client conversations this week: finance teams and business owners are revisiting how they manage employee expenses. In an environment of sustained inflationary pressure, expenses are one of the more controllable cost lines — provided the right systems are in place.

The consensus is that there is very little middle ground. Businesses either have a fully automated, integrated expense platform or they are still manually reconciling corporate card transactions on a spreadsheet. The hosts gave a positive mention to Moss as a spend management platform that has impressed internally, noting its ability to scan inboxes for receipts and match them to transactions automatically. They were also struck by a LinkedIn post praising Trainline's integration with SAP Concur, though both felt more integrations of that kind are needed across the market.

What to Watch Next

The Bank of England's CHAPS consultation response will set the pace for high-value payment modernisation in the UK. Watch for the timeline and treatment of bank holiday operating windows — those details will matter most to treasury teams with time-sensitive settlement obligations.

On the US side, Kevin Walshe's early moves at the Fed will signal how seriously direct fintech access to payment rails is being pursued. A future episode will take a closer look at Klarna's merchant proposition and its broader research on consumer payment behaviour — a useful reference point for any retailer reviewing its checkout stack.

Next steps

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