UK Finance

UK Finance offers two kinds of membership, and both are open only to organizations, never to individuals. Full membership is meant for financial services firms that typically hold, lend or invest money, and each member chooses one or more product streams such as payments, mortgages or commercial finance. UK Finance counts 300 members and 220 associate members, who get access to its policy work, statistics and research and join committees and member networks.

Associate membership is for organizations that support the financial services industry, and it comes in three levels called core, advanced and principal. Associate members can share their expertise with the members through the channels of UK Finance, receive regulatory updates and get discounted tickets for events.

UK Finance was formed on 1 July 2017 and took over most of the activities of six trade associations. These were the Asset Based Finance Association, the British Bankers' Association, the Council of Mortgage Lenders, Financial Fraud Action UK, Payments UK and The UK Cards Association. Several documents of the older bodies continue under the new name, and the former CML Handbook for conveyancers is now the UK Finance Mortgage Lenders' Handbook.

David Postings has been chief executive of UK Finance since 2021, after he had joined its board as a non-executive director in 2018. David Postings worked for 26 years at Barclays, led the commercial banking division of Lloyds Banking Group and was chief executive of Cattles, Moneycorp and Bibby Financial Services. David Postings also sits on the executive committee of the European Banking Federation and is a non-executive director of TheCityUK.

Bob Wigley chairs the board of UK Finance, and Christopher Beatty of Morgan Stanley International is its senior independent director. The managing directors include Jana Mackintosh for payments and innovation, Ruth Ray for economic crime and Alastair Gilmartin Smith as chief operating officer.

Every year UK Finance publishes the Annual Fraud Report on the losses that its members record from payment fraud, and a half-year update follows later in the year. In the edition of June 2026, UK Finance reports that criminals stole £1.28 billion through payment fraud in 2025, four percent more than in the year before. Unauthorized fraud, in which criminals use stolen card or account details, caused losses of £703.4 million, five percent less than a year earlier, and the industry prevented a further £1.68 billion.

Losses from authorized push payment fraud, where victims are tricked into sending money themselves, rose by 19 percent to £576.4 million in 248,070 cases. Investment scams were the largest category with £221.5 million, and the banks paid back £354.3 million, or 61 percent of these losses, to the victims.

UK Finance convenes the Great British Tokenised Deposit initiative, in which seven banks test tokenized deposits in pounds sterling: Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander. Tokenized deposits are digital versions of ordinary commercial bank money that keep the protection of a deposit and allow programmable transfers, and the shared platform comes from Quant. In 2026 the Bank of England accepted the initiative into its Synchronisation Lab, which tests settlement in central bank money.

In September 2026 UK Finance announced the completion of the first retail live pilots with real customer payments. In remortgages the funds were locked and released automatically at completion, and in a marketplace purchase they were released only when buyer and private seller had exchanged the goods. The project continues the work on a UK regulated liability network, whose experimentation phase UK Finance announced in April 2024.

The UK Finance Mortgage Lenders' Handbook sets out what lenders require from the solicitors and licensed conveyancers who act for them in purchases, remortgages and other secured loans. Part 1 holds the general instructions for all lenders that use the handbook, and Part 2 lists the details of each lender, such as contact points or whether it accepts search insurance. England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own version, and the edition for England and Wales adds a Part 3 for cases where the conveyancer acts only for the lender.

The handbook is part of the instructions that a lender gives to the conveyancer, so a conveyancer who ignores it can face claims for breach of contract and breach of professional duty.

The office of UK Finance is on the fifth floor of 1 Angel Court in London EC2R 7HJ, in the financial district of the City of London. The same address is the registered office of UK Finance Limited, the company with number 10250295 that trades as UK Finance.