The EU Instant Payments Regulation and the push for faster SEPA
Mandatory ten-second SEPA credit transfers bring new verification and screening obligations. We examine what PSPs need to have in place to comply and compete.
SEPA credit transfers were never required to be instant. Now they are.
The EU Instant Payments Regulation, which entered into force in 2024, closes a gap that had persisted since SEPA instant credit transfers first launched as an optional scheme: a payment service provider could offer standard SEPA credit transfers for years without ever offering the instant version.
Under the new rules, any PSP that offers SEPA credit transfers must also offer instant SEPA credit transfers, with the obligation phased in faster for euro-area PSPs and later for PSPs in non-euro-area member states.
We won't cite specific compliance dates here — the phasing is genuinely tiered by PSP type and geography, and institutions should confirm their own deadline against the regulation's text rather than a secondary source — but the direction is unambiguous: instant is becoming the baseline, not the premium option.
Verification of Payee and equal pricing
Before a payment is confirmed, the PSP must check that the name the customer entered matches the account holder registered against the IBAN, and flag it to the customer when it doesn't — a direct response to fraud where a criminal supplies a legitimate-looking name alongside an account they control.
The second provision is pricing: PSPs cannot charge more for an instant SEPA credit transfer than for a standard one. Instant stops being a premium add-on and becomes, functionally, the default rail.
Together, these requirements add up to more than a feature update. Settlement has to run 24/7/365, so screening that used to run inside an overnight batch window now has to clear in near real time, on every transaction; Verification of Payee touches the customer-facing confirmation flow directly; and because instant can no longer be priced at a premium, the cost of real-time processing has to be absorbed.
For banks and PSPs still running batch-oriented screening or treating instant SEPA as a bolt-on, this is a payment infrastructure project as much as a compliance one. Run Ventures maps where screening, confirmation flows and settlement processing need to change, and sequences the work against a phased deadline rather than a single go-live date.