Bacs overview Bacs is a not-for-profit, membership based industry body, owned by 13 of the leading banks and building societies in the UK and Europe. For almost 40 years, Bacs has been at the heart of the payments industry. It is responsible for the schemes behind the clearing and settlement of automated payments in the UK and maintaining the integrity of payment related services. Bacs is also developing and will manage the scheme for direct corporate and bureau access to the Faster Payments processing infrastructure, employing expertise and elements from its current solution set.
Almost 5.5 billion payments a year are made by Bacs' principle schemes, Direct Debit and Bacs Direct Credit, equating to approximately £3.4 trillion in 2006.
In June 2007, the number of transactions processed in one day hit an all time high of more than 83 million.
Almost three quarters of British adults are positively disposed towards Direct Debit. 35 million adults now have at least one Direct Debit commitment and approximately 115,000 businesses use Bacs services.
Selected as a 2007 business superbrand, Bacs is recognised as one of the strongest business-to-business (B2B) brands in Britain today.
Membership of the Bacs Affiliate Interest Group (AIG), a communication forum for payment scheme users and stakeholders, continues to grow. Its chief aim is to provide interested parties with the opportunity to receive updates on and provide feedback to developments within Bacs, including regulatory changes and their implications.
Bacs completed significant development of its infrastructure at the end of 2005, introducing Bacstel-IP as a totally new delivery channel to give more control to users, increased security, easier processing management for businesses and increased speed of processing to over 100,000 corporate customers accessing the Bacs service.