EBA CLEARING today confirmed that its instant payment system RT1 went live yesterday.

The pan-European system has gone live witha first group of 17 banks from 8 countries, which are extending SCT Inst reach to more than 500 addressable payment service providers. 

The scheme enables electronic euro-transfers – currently up to 15,000 euros – across Europe in less than ten seconds, at any time and on any day of the year, including weekends and holidays. 

“It is a great pleasure for us to confirm the successful go-live of RT1 on the start date of the SCT Inst Scheme. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this major co-operative achievement,”

said Erkki Poutiainen, Chairman of EBA CLEARING. “The timely launch of RT1 adds another milestone to EBA CLEARING’s track record of delivering pan-European payment infrastructure in time, on budget and in line with the requirements of payment service providers across Europe.”

Future development

Over the next 12 months, EBA CLEARING expects more early adopters to connect to the system, which could reach critical mass by the end of 2018.

Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA CLEARING, sadi, “The frontrunner participants in RT1 will be able to adapt their real-time processes to the budding real-time payments landscape while tapping into the potential of the SCT Inst Scheme for their customers from an early stage. We look forward to supporting the ramp-up of instant euro retail payments and any evolving customer needs with a pan-European infrastructure platform that is performant, highly resilient and very flexible.”

B2B instant payments

Consumers use of the system is expected to grow rapidly, particularly for consumer payments to business, see, but few obvious examples of B2B instant payments have been suggested at the launch of the scheme. However, in the UK at the launch of Faster Payments this happened too, yet today Faster Payments is an integral part of the B2B space. Much of the 20%+ annual growth of single immediate payments is from B2B.

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CTMfile take: The key question at the launch of SCT Inst is not whether it will be successful, but, “How much the new pan-Europe solution will slow and maybe even stop the growth in the use of TARGET2?”