Instant by default: what the Instant Payments Regulation asks of a bank's core
Regulation (EU) 2024/886 turns the instant euro transfer from a premium feature into the default way money moves. For a bank, the hard part is not the payment scheme. It is everything behind it that was built to wait until morning.
ABC Tech
What the regulation requires
The Instant Payments Regulation amends the SEPA Regulation. Every payment service provider in the EU that offers euro credit transfers must also offer instant ones, and it must offer them on the same terms. In practice that means five things.
- Instant everywhere a transfer is offered. If a customer can send a credit transfer in a channel, they must be able to send an instant one there too, and every account that can receive a transfer must be able to receive an instant one.
- Ten seconds, around the clock. An instant credit transfer is executed immediately: funds reach the payee within ten seconds, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
- The same price. An instant transfer may not cost more than a standard credit transfer of the same type.
- Verification of Payee. Before the customer authorises a transfer, the bank checks that the payee's name matches the IBAN and tells the customer if it does not. This applies to standard transfers as well as instant ones.
- Sanctions screening against the customer base. Instead of screening each instant transfer, banks check their own customers against EU sanctions lists at least once a day, and immediately after a new designation.
Consumers can also set a daily or per-transaction limit for instant transfers, and change it at any time.
The dates
The obligations arrive in steps. Euro-area banks are already inside them. Banks in member states outside the euro area follow in 2027.
| Obligation | Euro area | EU outside the euro area |
|---|---|---|
| Receive instant transfers | 9 January 2025 | 9 January 2027 |
| Send instant transfers | 9 October 2025 | 9 July 2027 |
| Verification of Payee | 9 October 2025 | 9 July 2027 |
| Daily sanctions screening | 9 January 2025 | 9 January 2025 |
Payment and e-money institutions have their own timeline: in the euro area, receiving and sending are both due by 9 April 2027.
Where banks get stuck
The scheme itself is well understood. The difficulty sits in the systems that were never asked to work at night.
A core that closes for the day
Many cores still run end-of-day processing, and some stop booking while it runs. An instant transfer cannot wait for the batch to finish. Postings, balances and limits have to update the moment money moves, including at three in the morning on a public holiday.
Liquidity that never sleeps
When payments settle around the clock, so does the bank's liquidity. Treasury needs positions it can trust at any hour and a way to fund the settlement account without someone at a desk.
Verification of Payee in every channel
The check has to run wherever a customer starts a transfer: the mobile app, internet banking, the branch and corporate bulk files. The result has to reach the customer in words they understand, before they confirm, without slowing the payment down.
Screening moves to the customer base
The regulation changes where sanctions screening happens. The bank now screens its own customers at least daily, and has to act on a new designation straight away. That depends on clean, current master data about every customer and every account holder.
Fees disappear, fraud does not
Pricing parity removes the instant premium, and faster money moves fraud faster too. Monitoring has to keep pace with a transfer that is final in seconds.
What it takes inside the platform
Compliance with the regulation is a property of the whole stack, from the booking engine to the confirmation screen.
- Real-time booking in the core. Every instant transfer posts to the account and to the General ledger as it happens, with no window where the core is unavailable.
- Checks before the money moves. Limits, AML screening and fraud rules run inside the payment flow, so an order is stopped before it leaves the bank.
- Verification of Payee built into the channels. Mobile and web show the match result in the confirmation step, in the customer's language, on the same screen as the payment.
- Limits the customer controls. Daily and per-transaction limits for instant transfers sit in the app, and the core enforces them the moment they change.
- One record for reconciliation. Payments, returns and fees read from the same record, so operations and finance see the same position at any hour.
Where ABC Tech fits
Instant payments are one module of the ABC Tech core, and the bank can take them on their own, keeping everything else on the systems it already runs. The module books in real time, runs AML screening and limits before a transaction executes, and supports SEPA Instant alongside national instant schemes. ABC Tech Digital banking carries instant transfers and the limits customers set into the mobile and web channels on the same platform, and in Agentic banking the customer sees the Verification of Payee result before confirming a transfer.
