General Direction 5 requires the operators of Bacs, Faster Payments, Cheque and Credit , and LINK to take all reasonable steps to avoid conflicts of interest between operators of payment systems and providers of central infrastructure to those same payment systems.

Notes

This is the revised version of General Direction 5 we published in March 2020. We published the original General Direction 5 as a part of our ‘day one’ Directions in March 2015.

In March 2018 we consulted on reviewing these Directions to ensure that they remained relevant and proportionate, reflecting market realities, changes to legislation and potential future developments. In March 2019 we published our decision on the review into our ‘day one’ Directions and consultation on the proposed Directions.

We also published our response paper RP20/1 in March 2020, explaining how we considered consultation responses to finalise the wording of the Directions. 

The revised General Direction 5 came into effect on 5 April 2020.

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