Outlook on Instant Payments in Europe
The SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme (SCT Inst), which operationalised euro-based Instant Payments, first went live in late 2017. Several years later, Instant Payments have still yet to see widespread adoption across Europe. While there are many explanations for this, most boil down to a combination of differing degrees of cooperation by financial institutions across regions, business models that discourage end user adoption due to high prices, and some attitudes of “wait and see” by some banks.
However, in November 2023 the European Commission and European Parliament proposed a new mandate meant to encourage Instant Payment adoption.
The requirements should not be a surprise to anyone as the European Commission (EC) has already issued a proposal back in October 2022 on what those requirements should be, including:
- All payment service providers (PSPs) need to enable end users to send and receive instant payments
Instant payments cannot be priced higher than the standard credit transfer - All PSPs would need to enable an IBAN name check functionality, ensuring that the sending party is aware of the name associated with the recipient account to cut down on fraud
- Sanctions screening would only need to be completed once per day rather than before each transaction.
These proposed changes will mean extensive changes in some markets and less in others – depending on varying levels of readiness across markets. This webinar discusses the state of instant payment adoption across Europe and offers insights into how ongoing changes such as the aforementioned EC directive and the upcoming PSD3 will affect the instant payments market in geographical Europe over the next few years.
Speakers:
- Declan Hourihan, EMEA Domestic Payments Product, Citi
- Cristian Cengher, Head of Payment Operations, Erste Bank
- Peter Larsson, Payments Practice Lead for Europe, Volante Technologies
- Andrew Gomez, Director, Lipis Advisors (Moderator)