NatWest, Nationwide, and HSBC UK have officially confirmed their participation in the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology’s (CFIT) Financial Inclusion Coalition, marking a major milestone in the ongoing effort to modernize accessible banking. Announced on October 15, 2026, the coalition is tasked with developing a pioneering "Supported Payments" framework. This framework is intentionally designed to establish a legally recognized middle ground between complete financial independence and heavy, formal legal arrangements such as Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) or formal deputyship.
The inclusion of these three financial heavyweights brings crucial institutional weight to an initiative that has rapidly gained momentum. This latest development follows closely on the heels of HM Treasury’s Economic Secretary welcoming the initiative publicly at the Fintech as a Force for Good conference in London just a week prior. This endorsement highlights a clear degree of government alignment that CFIT has carefully cultivated since initially securing Treasury funding to carry the project forward into its current operational phase.
From Grassroots Campaign to Institutional Programme
The foundational roots of the coalition trace back to Project Nemo, a not-for-profit organization founded by Joanne Dewar and Kris Foster. Over a dedicated period of more than two years, Project Nemo meticulously built the evidentiary base required to demonstrate the pressing need for disability inclusion across the modern financial services sector. As part of this foundational work, Nationwide led a significant research publication that successfully identified a profound structural gap within everyday banking operations.
According to the findings, individuals living with learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, or other conditions that require assistance with day-to-day spending currently find themselves facing a difficult binary choice. The existing financial system offers no practical midpoint or middle ground. In practice, consumers are forced to choose between informal, high-risk workarounds—such as sharing physical debit cards, disclosing personal PIN numbers, and handing over online banking login credentials—or triggering disproportionately heavy, expensive, and time-consuming legal mechanisms that are primarily designed for cases of severe mental incapacity.
CFIT formally launched the Financial Inclusion Coalition at the Money20/20 Europe conference in June 2026. Now, with the addition of NatWest, Nationwide, and HSBC UK—three of the largest retail banking institutions in the United Kingdom—the initiative has acquired the commercial scale and industry-wide backing necessary to transition effectively from theoretical research into tangible, real-world implementation.
Anna Wallace, Chief Executive of CFIT, emphasized the human impact and urgency of the coalition’s mission when addressing the industry. "For too many people, getting help to manage their money still means giving up more control than they should have to," Wallace said. "Tackling that challenge requires coordinated action across the industry. CFIT is here to do exactly that: marshal the expertise, commitment and resources needed to move beyond recognising the problem to developing and testing practical solutions that deliver meaningful change."
What the Framework Will Do and When
Throughout the remainder of 2026, participating financial institutions, technology experts, and stakeholder groups will execute focused project sprints split across two primary operational workstreams.
The first core workstream is dedicated to establishing a comprehensive Trust and Consent Framework. This pillar will carefully address how individuals could legitimately appoint a trusted third party to assist with day-to-day payments and account oversight without being forced to obtain a formal Power of Attorney. Furthermore, this workstream will tackle complex governance elements, including granular consent and permissioning models, clear liability considerations for all parties involved, and necessary regulatory alignment with existing financial statutes.
The second core workstream centers on a proof-of-concept pilot. This phase will potentially leverage existing open banking infrastructure to rigorously test supported payment journeys in authentic, real-world environments involving actual consumers, professional and family carers, and traditional financial institutions. Crucially, individuals with direct lived experience will be actively and directly involved in designing, reviewing, and testing the proposed customer journeys to ensure they meet genuine usability and accessibility standards.
An interim report detailing the coalition’s initial findings, strategic direction, and overarching governance framework is officially anticipated before the end of the year. That comprehensive report will directly inform and feed into a subsequent second phase, which will be entirely focused on building, refining, and testing a minimum viable product for Supported Payments across participating networks.
Regulatory and Market Context
This collaborative market initiative does not exist in a vacuum; it sits squarely within a broader, concerted UK regulatory push to make consumer financial services radically more accessible and inclusive. HM Treasury’s published Financial Inclusion Strategy has previously highlighted the persistent barriers faced by disabled and vulnerable consumers across the financial landscape.
At the same time, the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Consumer Duty—which came into full force in 2023—places explicit, binding obligations on all regulated financial firms to deliver consistently good outcomes for retail customers in vulnerable circumstances. Introducing a standardized, reliable Supported Payments framework would provide high street banks and building societies with a structured, fully regulated mechanism to meet these ongoing statutory obligations. This structured approach helps move institutions away from relying on informal, ad-hoc accommodations that can inadvertently expose both the vulnerable customer and the financial institution to unacceptable levels of financial and operational risk.
The open banking angle of the initiative remains a critical area to watch as development progresses. Utilizing Payment Initiation Services (PIS) or Account Information Services (AIS) under the UK’s existing open banking frameworks—originally derived from PSD2—could theoretically allow a trusted third party to safely initiate or oversee specific payments on behalf of an account holder without requiring full, unrestricted account access. This technical path could potentially resolve many of the thorniest consent and liability questions that the coalition is currently working through. Whether this technical pathway proves entirely sufficient on its own, or if primary legislation will ultimately be required to establish a secure statutory liability framework for trusted third parties, is expected to emerge as a central question addressed in the upcoming interim report.
