Corporate overview

Bacs is a not-for-profit, membership based, industry body, responsible for the processing of more than 5.5 billion payments a year. At the end of November 2007, the number of transactions processed in one day through Bacs increased by 8.4% resulting in a new daily processing peak of more than 90.3 million items.

It is owned by 13 of the leading banks and building societies in the UK and Europe. It has been at the heart of the payments industry for 40 years and 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.

Bacs provides two principal electronic payment schemes; Direct Debit and Bacs Direct Credit. Payments made by these two schemes in 2007 equated to approximately £3.7 trillion. These products have increased convenience and provided peace of mind for tens of millions of consumers through the delivery of safe and efficient payments. Almost three quarters of British adults are positively disposed towards Direct Debit. 75% of 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.

Bacs completed significant development of its infrastructure at the end of 2005, introducing Bacstel-IP as a new delivery channel to give more control to users, increased security, easier processing management for businesses and increased speed of processing to corporate customers accesssing the Bacs service.