While some countries have already established methods that offer intra-daily payments for all their customer groups, until now the major economic regions tended to use more traditional payment methods. While the SEPA regulation significantly standardised European payments, at that time the focus was not on the execution speed of the transactions. This is changing with the introduction of SEPA instant payments.

Thanks to SEPA instant payments you can execute credit transfers anytime 365 days a year. Within a matter of seconds the recipient has the money at his disposal and the payment is final. This method, which is available to all customer groups, marks an important advancement that fulfills the requirements of an increasingly faster economy and the digitisation of commerce.

Challenging implementation

Many aspects have to be considered when introducing a fundamentally new and transnational payment method. Apart from a seamless integration into existing processes and a matching business strategy for the introduction of new products, a focus also needs to lie on the on-going further development and interoperability.

Since SEPA instant payments can only be executed between customers of participating financial institutions, the new standard depends on network effects – after all, customers expect that the recipient of a payment can also receive said payment. The interest is strong: even though financial institutions are not yet obligated to support SEPA instant payments, many have already started the implementation.