Supporting the smooth uptake of instant payments: Pan-European infrastructure principles revisited and checked against the live RT1 system

Abstract

In November 2017, the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) witnessed the introduction of realtime euro payments following the launch of the European Payments Council’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme and the first systems capable of processing instant payments. In preparation for this major date, which also saw its own instant payment platform, RT1, go live, EBA CLEARING published a white paper on pan-European infrastructure considerations. The paper focused on crucial drivers of success for instant payments and how they could best be supported in the infrastructure layer. A year after the publication of this paper, the company revisited these drivers, as well as the elements, processes and arrangements it had implemented at the level of its RT1 system in order to support them. The aim was to determine whether these measures had contributed to the uptake and smooth day-to-day processing of instant payments. The present paper provides a summary of this reality check.