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082010 - White paper Galitt – Request-to-Pay
already over 3 million payments per week processed in SCT Inst, with 99 percent of transactions
settled in less than 3 seconds.
Instant Payments in Europe has been building on the success of earlier initiatives – from the UK’s
Faster Payment back in 2008 to Spain’s Bizum in 2016, as well as Sweden’s Swish (2012) and Italy’s
Jiffy (2014), just to name a few.
In turn, Instant Payment's’ steady roll out makes it the second driving force for the upcoming Request-
to-Pay (RtP) initiative. Online banking/digitization of payments means that retail payments can be
made from anywhere. Instant Payment ushers in another major quantum leap by eliminating time
delays when making payments. On top of real time, SCT Inst is available round the clock, throughout
the year. It is available day and night with immediate results.
Furthermore, it provides instantaneous finality by design to each unitary payment. This means a
dedicated, underlying interbank system (e.g. TIPS) settles each operation in real time, unlike today’s
mass retail payments, where this occurs later in batches. In practice, it is tantamount to payment
guarantee. Beforehand, this was a privilege restricted to a very small number of high-worth
transactions, directly settled in central bank systems – the so-called TARGET2 payments.
To this end, a pan-European infrastructure has been successfully running since the end of 2018.
Operated by the European Central Bank (ECB), the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS)
system provides the final and irrevocable settlement of Instant Payments – in the Euro currency, for
the time being. This also confers SEPA-wide reachability to Instant Payment-enabled PSPs.
Finally, it is also paramount from a legal perspective that Instant Payments can rely on an EU-
governed infrastructure (TIPS), just like its scheme – SCT Inst. This already makes it the target
payment instrument of the future. In the long run, it should become the new norm for credit transfers,
of course, but also for other retail payment operations – as hinted at by the European Payment
Initiative (EPI).
1.3. Guidelines for interoperable Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment
(EIPP)
Any corporate accountant’s dream is to have outgoing invoices easily matched with customers’
incoming payments – and vice-versa. Dematerializing, exchanging and tracking invoices is the first
step toward achieving this. Whether they are blockchain-based or enabled by an older technology,
the egg-and-chicken dilemma remains the same, whatever the solution: Which e-invoicing provider
has enough coverage to convince an ample number of customers and suppliers to sign up to its
offering?
This “network-effect” roadblock was the cornerstone of an EU Commission initiative when, in early
2009, it launched the European E-Invoicing (EEI) expert group. The EEI taskforce brought together a
team of suppliers and corporate user representatives. Within a year, it delivered a report focusing on
interoperability hurdles and recommendations. This would have simply been yet another smart report
with little practical application were it not for the Euro Retail Payments Board’s (ERPB) later decision
– made after SEPA (SCTs, SDDs) had gone mass market – to accelerate further innovation and
standardization around core payment.
With the ambition still firmly in its sights, the SEPA decision-making body put truly interoperable EIPP
on its roadmap. In November of last year, an EPC-led stakeholder group delivered practical guidelines,
building a convincing base for what had in parallel grown as one of RtP’s emerging use cases.