Building Real-Time Payments: UK Fast Payments - The Architecture

Part 2 - Building Tomorrow's Financial Systems

This image is AI generated

Hi Everyone,

As I explore how to architect the UK Fast Payments, here’s what I have learned. Building a real-time payments platform requires careful consideration of multiple complex factors:

1. Strategic decisions about direct vs. indirect participation

2. Operational excellence for 24/7 availability

3. Regulatory compliance across multiple frameworks

4. Security architecture for sensitive financial data

5. Performance optimisation for instant processing

6. Cloud-native design for scalability and resilience

The technology exists to meet these challenges. With proper planning, modern cloud architecture, and a focus on operational excellence, fintechs can successfully implement instant payments that delight customers while meeting all regulatory requirements.

The key is to start with a clear understanding of your scale, regulatory requirements, and growth trajectory, then build a platform that can evolve with your business needs.As you follow along you will learn that there are many variations in designing architectures.

In this post you will receive:

• A production-grade serverless architecture diagram.

• Deep decision analysis for every component, aligned to the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

UK fintechs race to deliver 24/7 instant payments, facing unique operational, regulatory, and performance challenges. In this deep-dive guide, I will walk through how a fully serverless, zero-trust, BYOC architecture on AWS directly addresses those challenges—using only managed services to ensure compliance, resilience, and sub-second performance.

The architecture design below aligns with the stated objectives that are set out in our previous post:

The high level solution architecture design can be viewed here: