Two months ago we reported from the FCA register that Amazon Payments UK Limited had quietly become an authorised UK electronic money institution, and that its older payment institution licence — the one Amazon's own legal pages still cite — looked like the next thing to go. It has gone. The FCA's Financial Services Register now shows the payment institution authorisation as "Cancelled – Authorised PI", effective 15 September 2026.
Nobody announced this either. It surfaced in License Watch, our register-monitoring feed, in the weekly diff of the FCA's public payment-services extract.
What the register shows
| Entity | Amazon Payments UK Limited |
| Register | FCA Financial Services Register (UK) — PSD firms extract |
| Reference (FRN) | 799814 |
| Status before | Authorised Payment Institution (held since 10 July 2018) |
| Status now | "Cancelled – Authorised PI" |
| Effective | 2026-09-15 |
| Register data as of | close of business 2026-09-16 |
Verify it yourself: FRN 799814 on the FCA register. The wording above is the regulator's own.
The full Amazon picture on the UK register is now three lines:
| FRN | Entity | Register | Status | Effective |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1041721 | AMAZON PAYMENTS UK LIMITED | E-money | Authorised Electronic Money Institution | 2026-07-15 |
| 799814 | Amazon Payments UK Limited | PSD | Cancelled – Authorised PI | 2026-09-15 |
| 900946 | Amazon Payments Europe S.C.A. | E-money | Cancelled – Authorised EMI | — |
One live authorisation, two cancelled ones. Amazon's UK payments business now runs on a single native UK e-money licence.
Why cancel a licence you just used for eight years?
Because an EMI authorisation makes a PI authorisation redundant. Under the UK's Electronic Money Regulations, an authorised e-money institution may provide every payment service a payment institution can, plus issue e-money and hold customer funds. Once FRN 1041721 took effect on 15 July, FRN 799814 was a second permission for a subset of the same activities — extra safeguarding accounts, extra regulatory reporting, extra capital, no extra capability.
The two-month gap between the grant (15 July) and the cancellation (15 September) is the migration window: moving merchant and seller agreements onto the new entity's permissions, re-pointing safeguarding arrangements, and giving the FCA the notifications a cancellation requires. Sixty-two days is a brisk cutover for a business the size of Amazon Pay's UK operation.
What it means if you use Amazon Pay in the UK
- Your counterparty's licence reference changed. Merchant due-diligence files, PSP inventories and gambling-regulator payment-chain submissions that cite FRN 799814 now cite a cancelled permission. The live one is FRN 1041721. If you maintain a licence register for your payment chain — the License Watch use case — this is exactly the kind of silent change it exists to catch.
- Nothing about the service changed for merchants — the EMI licence is a superset. What changed is which permission the service runs under, and that is what an auditor or regulator will ask you to evidence.
- Amazon's own disclosures are still catching up. As of publication, Amazon Pay's UK legal page still references the payment institution authorisation. The register is ahead of the company's own documentation, which is normal: register changes precede press releases and often precede website updates by months.
See Amazon Pay's directory profile for the entity, licence and coverage data we hold, and the UK provider listing for alternatives that hold their own FCA authorisation.
The pattern
This is the third act of a story the register told on its own: Luxembourg e-money entity passported into the UK (pre-Brexit) → UK payment institution licence (2018) → native UK e-money authorisation (July 2026) → old PI licence cancelled (September 2026). Each step was visible on the FCA register weeks before — or instead of — any announcement. Brite Payments' UK EMI grant surfaced the same way.
The week this cancellation landed, the same FCA extract also recorded CFS-ZIPP Limited's e-money authorisation as cancelled (10 August), Connect Plus Business Ltd's PI authorisation as cancelled (11 September), and a new authorised payment institution, Computershare Advantage Payment Services Limited (19 August). Grants and cancellations both move markets for the businesses built on top of them, and neither reliably comes with a press release.
Why you're reading it here
License Watch diffs the FCA, EBA, ESMA MiCA, FINTRAC, FinCEN and ASIC registers every week and publishes every grant, cancellation, revocation and status change with a citation link to the regulator's own record. No claim without a citation — if we can't cite it, we don't publish it.
Read the latest issue, or request access to the weekly digest.
PaymentProviders.io is an informational service. Registry data belongs to the issuing regulators; status labels reflect the regulator's own wording. This article is not financial or legal advice, and PaymentProviders.io is not affiliated with Amazon.
