The Drift Layer
Response to the RPIB consultation on the Design of the Future Retail Payments Infrastructure, Questions 11, 17, 17a and 18
| Author | Matthew T. Kirby, Independent Researcher, River Falls, Wisconsin, USA — matthew.kirby@driftlayer.org |
|---|---|
| Date | 9 September 2026 (submitted). Published here 10 September 2026. |
| Version | 1 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
| Submitted to | Bank of England, Retail Payments Infrastructure Board. The consultation closes 11 September 2026; the Bank publishes a summary of responses. |
Abstract
A response to the Bank of England's Retail Payments Infrastructure Board consultation on the Design of the Future Retail Payments Infrastructure, addressing Questions 17, 17a and 18 on agentic payments and advanced delegation, with a short observation on Question 11 and a note on the Equality Act 2010. It argues that the published agent-payment protocols already recognise the moment at which execution and authority come apart, but share no transaction-scoped artefact recording what a human approved when brought back into the loop; that the payment rails cannot reconstruct the authority decision, because authority is evaluated on one plane while money moves on another; and that the core infrastructure requirement is narrower than any protocol choice — the messaging architecture should be able to carry stable, transaction-bound references to authority evidence, so that an executed agentic payment can later be joined to the authority and the evaluation that permitted it. Four measures are proposed for making mandate conformance answerable.
The file
| rpib-consultation-response-v1.pdf | |
| Size | 121,493 bytes · 8 pages · A4 |
| SHA-256 | 96bb5224b2c419e4dc64885256a4ab97ffad255cd8d81117ec5c184e919a316c |
The file published here is byte-identical to the one sent to the Bank on 9 September 2026. The submission as filed gives the author's address as matthew.kirby@mandatepatch.org; correspondence about this publication should go to the address above.
Cite as
@misc{kirby2026rpib,
author = {Kirby, Matthew T.},
title = {Response to the {RPIB} Consultation on the Design of the Future
Retail Payments Infrastructure: Questions 11, 17, 17a and 18},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
howpublished = {\url{https://driftlayer.org/papers/rpib-consultation-response/}},
note = {Version 1}
}
Versions
Version 1 — 10 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.