What are instant payments?

Last updated on 24 July 2025 (first published on 26 September 2016)

We live in a world of instant messages – yet it can still take up to one business day to complete an electronic payment in the EU. And if we make an electronic payment at the weekend or on a public holiday, it might not even begin its journey to the recipient until the next business day.

With instant payments, the money transferred are made available in the recipient’s account within seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. European payment service providers have agreed on a common set of rules and standards for making instant payments – the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme.

What is SEPA?

SEPA stands for Single Euro Payments Area. And SEPA’s goal? To allow everyone to make payments in euro to anyone anywhere in Europe, as easily, securely and efficiently as we can in our own countries, whether by direct debit, card or (instant) credit transfer.

Ensuring a level playing field for instant payments

Although the use of instant payments has been growing continuously, not everyone across Europe has had equal access to instant payments. This has changed with the Instant Payments Regulation. EU payment service providers offering “regular” credit transfers in euro are now additionally required to offer the option of sending and receiving instant payments in euro.

Under this legislation, charges applied to instant payments must not be higher than those already applied to regular credit transfers with the same features and sent via the same channel. The requirements were put in place to make sure that instant payments are widely available to both consumers and businesses.

What are the benefits of instant payments?

With instant payments, you can send and receive electronic payments in euro anytime, anywhere. In some countries you can already send instant payments via your mobile phone, with a cash-like experience in terms of speed and convenience. So, whether you’re out with friends and splitting a bill for dinner or lending money to one of them for the evening, it’s still quick and easy. However, most of these solutions only work within national borders and cannot be used to make payments to users in other countries.

In e-commerce, instant payments can eliminate the seller’s risk of not getting paid, as the payment is received before the goods are sent. For business-to-business payments, instant payments can improve cash flow, make it easier to manage money, reduce late payments and speed up the payment and reconciliation of invoices. Instant payments provide a platform for further innovation by payment services providers and businesses alike, as well as increased operational efficiency. They facilitate the creation of additional digital payment solutions and add-on features, enhancing user experience and bringing increased competition to the payments sector.

What is the ECB’s role?

The ECB is responsible for the safety and efficiency of electronic payments in euro. In view of this remit, the full deployment of instant payments is a major objective of the Eurosystem’s retail payments strategy. Instant payments can increase the resilience and strategic autonomy of the European payments market by reducing its reliance on non-EU service providers.

To promote innovation, we are working with the payments industry to agree on common rules and standards and to remove any remaining obstacles to making payments across EU countries. The ECB chairs a group – the Euro Retail Payments Board – that brings together representatives of providers and users of payment services with the aim of making the EU payments market more integrated, innovative and competitive. The Board identifies common priorities and fosters activities aimed at addressing fragmentation in the retail payments market. It has been driving work on pan-European instant payments since 2014 and is monitoring progress as instant payments become more widely used.

To make it easier for payment service providers to offer instant payments, the ECB has developed a service that enables providers to settle payments immediately, safely and around the clock. The TARGET instant payment settlement (TIPS) service was launched in November 2018 and allows payment service providers to process the instant payments made by their customers to anyone, right across Europe.