The Drift Layer
Response to the HM Treasury consultation on Modernising Payment Services Regulation, Questions 15, 16, 17, 18 and 42
| Author | Matthew T. Kirby, Independent Researcher, River Falls, Wisconsin, USA — matthew.kirby@driftlayer.org |
|---|---|
| Date | 13 September 2026 (submitted). Published here 13 September 2026. |
| Version | 1 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
| Submitted to | HM Treasury, Payments and Fintech team. The consultation was published in July 2026 and closes 6 October 2026. |
Abstract
A response to HM Treasury's consultation Modernising Payment Services Regulation (July 2026), addressing Questions 15, 16, 17, 18 and 42, with reference to paragraph 4.12 and Question 21. It agrees with the consultation's statement that the Payment Services Regulations 2017 were designed before agentic AI, and locates the difficulty precisely: the framework assumes that the act of consenting and the act of paying are close together in time, and that what the payer consented to can be reconstructed from the transaction itself — and agentic payments break both assumptions. The consequence is that a transaction can now satisfy every machine-enforced condition of a delegated authority while still raising a genuine question whether the payer consented to the transaction ultimately executed. The regulations already contain the legal test for that question — regulation 67 on consent, regulation 75 on the burden of proof, regulation 76 on the refund obligation keyed to it — but the payment record may not contain the evidence needed to answer it. The recommendation is not that the Government mandate a mechanism. It is that regulation should require the question to be answerable, and countable: that the evidence be produced at the time authority is given, retained through the period in which a dispute may arise, and measured against definitions that are published, free and citable by anyone.
The files
| Version 1 | hmt-payment-services-consultation-response-v1.pdf 97,702 bytes · 9 pages · A4 SHA-256 d67252e569a8114960f380abd2d0639c1279249e0be48ee1af0c97bfd679fcf9 |
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The file published here is byte-identical to the one sent to HM Treasury on 13 September 2026.
Cite as
@misc{kirby2026hmt,
author = {Kirby, Matthew T.},
title = {Response to the {HM} {Treasury} Consultation on Modernising Payment
Services Regulation: Questions 15, 16, 17, 18 and 42},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
howpublished = {\url{https://driftlayer.org/papers/hmt-payment-services-consultation-response/}},
note = {Version 1}
}
Versions
Version 1 — 13 September 2026. First publication; the text as submitted, unchanged.
Versions are never overwritten. See versions and errata.
Disclosure
A US provisional patent application (No. 64/141,321) was filed on 26 August 2026 and precedes both the disclosure and the repository. The specification is published as Mandate Lifecycle Extensions for Agentic Payment Credentials, Technical Disclosure Commons, Defensive Publications Series no. 11517 (August 2026), under CC BY 4.0. A reference implementation of the artefact layer is published at github.com/MandatePatch/mandatepatch under Apache-2.0. The mechanisms described are one implementation of a more general requirement. Each licence governs what it names and nothing else.