Bacs is now owned and operated by leading retail payments authority Pay.UK, along with Faster Payments and the Image Clearing System, the digital way to process cheques. In addition to their important role operating the UK's national retail payment systems, Pay.UK also manages a number of services for the benefit of the UK payments industry.

These range from the Biller Update Service, which provides participating organisations with a centrally managed facility to update and disseminate biller information, to the Extended Industry Sort Code Directory, a downloadable database containing information about all payment service providers that are connected to the UK clearing systems.

In addition, the SEPA IBAN-Only Directory helps reduce the instances of payment errors by encouraging more SEPA payments to be made electronically – through straight through processing – minimising the need for manual intervention.

You can find out more about all of these on the Pay.UK website, via the links below.