Mastercard’s payment technology allows developers to safely test and refine new features and capabilities within a trusted and secure environment, without affecting critical infrastructure.
Later in 2025, Mastercard intends to provide access to its A2A instant payments technology via a sandbox. This platform will allow UK banks and financial institutions to experiment, validate, and collaborate on new payment methods, while modernising the UK’s A2A payment ecosystem using Mastercard’s optimal payment technology.
The potential for new ideas is large, as banks and financial institutions can test various methods, including retail and digital assets, across person-to-person, person-to-merchant, and business-to-business use cases.
For example, the sandbox will allow banks and fintechs to implement a ‘5-leg credit transfer’ with confirmation of funds; therefore, a consumer can make a retail real-time payment, with the merchant receiving immediate confirmation of the payment.
The sandbox will conform to ISO 20022 standards, introducing various new features enabled by enriched data, such as optimised data flow alongside transactions. This rich data facilitates the development of augmented methods for improving fraud detection and reduction and supports future enhancements.
Toward the end of 2024, the UK government published the National Payments Vision (NPV), which outlines its goals for the payments sector and how to optimise economic growth through the implementation of modern services. The A2A sandbox enables this, allowing banks and fintechs to prepare for shifts in the payments landscape.
Optimising the UK’s A2A infrastructure offers potential benefits. According to an EY report published in March 2025, there was a potential annual increase of GBP 8 billion to GDP. Implementing a sandbox is a key step in unlocking this growth, laying the foundation for new infrastructure capabilities and products.
Along with introducing new features, the sandbox demonstrates what a new account-to-account infrastructure can achieve for the UK. Built on Mastercard’s A2A Instant Payment platform, this cloud-based solution provides top front-end tools, a user-friendly interface, and a developer portal. Its back end offers powerful functionality with API access to support enhanced integration.
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