Fearing 'unrealistic' rapid payment deadlines, EU banks

According to previously released statistics, a third of EU banks do not already provide a rapid payments service, and the majority have been deterred by the January 2025 deadline.

Madilyn Swift

March 28, 2024

1Min Read

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Payments

According to a RedCompass Labs poll of 200 payment specialists at EU-based banks, 58% of the banks that do not presently provide an immediate payments service think the deadlines are too improbable, and 33% are not sure they will be met.

Nevertheless, despite these reservations, nearly 77% of respondents still think that rapid payments have more advantages than disadvantages, and 55% of them intend to make instant payments the standard option for their customers.

It was also discovered in the paper So You Think You're Ready for SEPA Instant? that banks might be underestimating the amount of processing that goes into it.

Although most banks strive to process 101–300 payments per second, bulk payment files have the potential to hold millions of payments. RedCompass therefore states that banks should strive to process at least 1,000 payments per second.

In order to comply with the new SEPA regulations, the majority of the banks polled (76%) also expect an increase in their IT budgets, with an average increase of between €1 and €3 million per bank.

RedCompass Labs CEO Tom Hewson declared, "The EU's new regulation demonstrates that the instant payments revolution has officially arrived in Europe."

"Our research indicates that there is a reasonable degree of apprehension regarding the nearness of the deadlines and a potential underestimate of the amount of money they must invest and scale their throughput," Hewson continued.

Given that there is no one-size-fits-all solution applicable to all banks, it is anticipated that alternative approaches will be explored. These approaches aim to avoid the necessity of banks altering their core banking systems.