The European Payments Council issuance of their specifications for a real-time payment solution covering most of Europe is starting to produce results. EBA Clearing have just issued a Press Release announcing their partnership with SIA.

EBA CLEARING & SIA sign letter of intent

“As a major provider of payment infrastructure services for euro transactions, the bank-owned EBA CLEARING Company plans to offer the first instant payment infrastructure service of pan-European scale to financial institutions across the continent.

The role of SIA will be to support EBA CLEARING as technical solution provider in the creation and implementation of this real-time payment system. SIA was identified as the preferred provider for this pan-European infrastructure delivery project during a Request for Proposal process launched in October 2015. 

The delivery of an instant payment system would be the second major market infrastructure development project that EBA CLEARING is taking forward in co-operation with SIA following the implementation of Europe’s leading private-industry SEPA platform STEP2. SIA also serves as a technical operator of STEP2, which processes over 40 million SEPA transactions per day on average.

“Signing a letter of intent represents a significant milestone in our Company’s journey towards delivering a pan-European infrastructure solution for instant payments in co-operation with SIA,” said Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA CLEARING.

“As a next step, we are now inviting interested payment service providers to join our initiative. We look forward to working with SIA and these pilot users on the development of a platform that can be used for instant payments both at a domestic and cross-border level.”

New instant payments solution

The future EBA CLEARING solution is geared at handling any euro transactions that are in line with the instant payment definition and requirements formulated by the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) in late 2014; it should thus be able to support any real-time payment products that payment service providers in Europe may decide to offer to their customers. It is planned that the service offered by EBA CLEARING will be in line with the global messaging standards for instant payments (ISO 20022) and fully compliant with the SCTInst Scheme that is being created by the European Payments Council.

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CTMfile take: The availability of a pan-Europe instant payment solution from the end of 2017 will change the payments and collections landscape in Europe. How are you going to change: 1, your emergency payment & collection processes, and then 2. your 

 regular daily processes?