Welcome to Debt Matters, the UK debt collection and credit control podcast where we turn the biggest stories into practical takeaways for anyone chasing cashflow. Today: Mastercard has hired Sir Jon Thompson to chair Vocalink, right as the Bank of England prepares decisions around the UK’s next-generation payments platform.

What happened

Mastercard is strengthening its position in the UK payments infrastructure conversation by appointing Sir Jon Thompson—a high-profile former senior public sector leader as chair of Vocalink, Mastercard’s UK payments business. The move is widely seen as part of Vocalink’s push to win a major contract linked to developing a new UK payments platform focused on account-to-account transfers.

Vocalink already underpins critical rails like Bacs, Faster Payments, and LINK.

Why this matters to UK debt collection and credit control

If the UK expands and modernises account-to-account options (and reduces reliance on card rails), that can change:

1. How quickly money moves

Faster settlement can reduce “I paid it” disputes.

It can also shrink the window where debtors delay or play timing games.

2. The cost of getting paid

The Bank of England has highlighted merchant card costs averaging 0.6% per sale, and the argument is that an extra payment option could increase competition and lower costs. If payment costs fall, more businesses may push harder on bank transfer-first payment journeys relevant for B2B collections and invoice recovery.

3. Operational resilience risk

The story also touches the concern that heavy reliance on a small number of payment giants could become a vulnerability in a major outage or cyber event. If payments go down, your DSO blows out overnight—no matter how good your collections process is.

4. Compliance and governance scrutiny

Vocalink was fined £11.9m by the Bank of England in 2025 for failing to meet certain requirements around systems and controls, which adds a governance layer to this whole debate. For collections teams, that’s a reminder: the rails you rely on can become a risk factor you don’t control.

What to do next

Here are 5 actions credit controllers and collections managers can take now, regardless of who wins the contract:

1) Refresh your “payment method hierarchy”

Put the easiest, lowest-friction bank transfer options at the top of your comms (email, SMS, letters).

Keep cards as a backup, not the default especially for B2B.

2) Build an outage-ready collections workflow

If Faster Payments or your payment provider has downtime, what’s Plan B?

Prepare templated comms: “Payment rails are experiencing issues here’s an alternative method.”

3) Reduce payment disputes with better payment proof

Standardise what you request as proof: reference, timestamp, payer name, last 4 digits (where appropriate).

Add “payment reference rules” to every reminder.

4) Tighten reconciliation

Quicker payments only help if you can match them quickly.

If your reconciliation lags 48–72 hours, debtors will exploit it.

5) Review your vulnerability and cyber playbook

Cyber disruption isn’t just an IT problem—it’s a cashflow problem.

Make sure credit control sits in the incident response chain, not outside it.

Talking point for the episode

Here’s the question to debate internally:

Do we have a collections strategy that assumes payments always work?

Because the moment payments infrastructure becomes a headline, the knock-on effect is late payment, disputes, and arrears fast.

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