The new Payment service ‘SEPA Instant Credit transfer’ in Europe

Instant Payment will be the fastest way to transfer customer payments between Banks in Europe. Today payment orders are typically booked with a delay of 1-2 days on the individual accounts. In certain use cases, where you have services like delivery against payment this could be already too slow such that there is a credit risk for the receiver. With instant payment, the booking will be done within 10 sec. to enable a high availability of the transferred money.

In the Euro zone all Institutes that offer EUR payment services to their clients must offer Instant Payment in EUR. This is regulated for the eurozone in the Instant Payment Regulation (IPR). It also affects non-EU institutes that offer Payments in EUR.

When will IPR come into force and when will it be applied?

The IPR was published on 19 March 2024 and entered into force on 8 April 2024. There are two different deadlines for its application, depending on whether the Payment service provider (PSP) sends or receives immediate payments. For the receipt of immediate payments, the PSP has nine months from the date of entry into force to fulfil the requirements of the IPR. This means that by 9 January 2025, all bank PSPs in the EU must be able to receive instant payments from their customers. The second deadline is 18 months later on 9 October 2025, by which time all banking PSPs in the eurozone must offer their customers the ability to send instant payments.

For bank PSPs in non-euro countries, the deadline for receiving instant payments is 9 January 2027 and for sending instant payments 9 July 2027.

The impact of instant payment

Instant Payment means to send and receive payments around the clock for 24/7/365. The maximal time frame to book these orders on the customer accounts is 10 sec. These requirements lead to a substantial challenge for the payment - and booking systems to guarantee this high availability.

Profit from our expertise

We know the payment ecosystem together with Avaloq in detail and can consult you to get a roadmap, to select the appropriate payment partner as well as to implement the end2end process. We look forward to supporting your implementation of Instant Payments.