Instant payments in Europe: who to take inspiration from, and what still holds adoption back?

Instant payments are no longer a niche innovation in Europe’s payments landscape. Over the past two years, the uptake of SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT-Inst) has accelerated significantly, rising from around 15%¹ of total credit transfers in 2023  to over 35% in Q1 2026². This momentum reflects a broader shift: instant payments are steadily becoming part of the mainstream.

A key catalyst has been the introduction of the European Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) in 2025. By making instant payments mandatory for payment service providers offering SCT, the regulation aims to level the playing field, foster competition and enhance pricing transparency. More fundamentally, it reflects Europe’s ambition to make instantaneity a standard feature of its domestic payments market.

Adoption is growing, but use cases remain selective

While uptake continues to increase year after year, instant payments are still primarily driven by consumer-oriented use cases. Person-to-person and consumer-to-business B2C payments have been quick to adopt instant transfers, particularly for proximity payments or urgent situations. As a result, companies operating in B2C environments are naturally seeing a higher share of inbound instant payments.

Outbound instant payments from corporates, however, remain more measured. For many organizations, adopting instant payments is not simply a question of speed, but of transformation. It affects end to end processes, from commercial flows through to logistics, accounting, treasury and risk management, and often requires significant changes to IT infrastructures.

Unsurprisingly, corporate adoption has therefore focused first on use cases where immediacy delivers tangible value. Customer refunds in retail or travel, for example, help reduce friction and enhance customer experience. Payouts such as wages advances or indemnities respond to growing expectations for flexibility. Insurance claims settlements benefit from faster disbursement and lower administrative costs. In B2B relationships, just in time supplier payments can help optimize working capital, while liquidity sweeping allows funds to be concentrated or redistributed on demand, even outside traditional business hours. These use cases start to emerge, with more and more companies starting their journey into Instantaneity, but still remain marginal to date.

That said, corporates do not necessarily seek ever shorter execution times for all payments. Current discussions around “non time critical” payments - e.g. payments via file uploads guaranteed to be delivered the same date, but without the 10 second constraint, thus limiting the risk of rejects - illustrate this well. The priority is often less about absolute speed than about control, automation and operational risk management. In that sense, making processes “instant compatible” can be more important than executing every payment instantly.

From instant payments to real time treasury

For corporates, instant payments only become truly transformative when they are combined with near real-time access to information. Real-time visibility on cash positions, payment statuses and incoming flows fundamentally changes the way treasury can be managed.

This is driving a gradual shift towards a more event driven treasury model, where payments are closely linked to underlying business events such as delivery or invoice validation. In some cases, beneficiaries themselves can initiate structured payment requests, moving from a traditional “push” logic towards more “pull based” models that facilitate automation and reconciliation.

In this context, value increasingly lies in data orchestration and in how seamlessly payment information is integrated into internal systems. The rise of API³s illustrate this evolution particularly well, enabling companies to access precisely the information they need, when they need it, directly within their ERP⁴ or treasury management systems.

Why 24/7 availability matters even more than speed

The shift towards instant payments inevitably raises broader questions around availability. For corporates, moving towards a fully real time operating model represents a significant transformation. It requires investment in modernizing IT chains, improving corporate to bank connectivity and ensuring access to high quality, structured data.

It also prompts reflection on the role of people in a 24/7 environment. While technology has largely removed technical cut-offs, “human cut-offs” remain. Will treasury teams need to operate around the clock in the future, or will new operating models emerge to reconcile real time capabilities with human constraints? This may end up creating distortions between regional and international groups. Ability to mobilize treasury teams around the clock may allow the latter to optimize their payments (e.g. later in the day) at the expense of the former. And could revolutionize the “treasurer’s day” as we know it. AI can surely help, but the need for control still prevents excluding the human in the loop.

From a banking infrastructure perspective, continuous availability can prove more demanding than instant execution itself. Payments may be available at all times, while certain settlement mechanisms – particularly for foreign exchange – still operate within defined windows. This tension is one of the key challenges of the shift to 24/7.
For banks, this evolution brings its own set of challenges, notably around intraday liquidity management, transaction monitoring and real time fraud prevention. Instantaneity requires greater agility, stronger controls and highly resilient systems.

Europe’s domestic cross border advantage

One of Europe’s distinctive strengths lies in its ability to treat cross border payments as domestic. A SEPA instant payment operates within a harmonized framework, supported by common rules and infrastructures. For multinational corporates, this consistency offers a clear operational advantage.

Elsewhere, innovation can be equally dynamic, but payment ecosystems often remain fragmented. In regions such as the US or parts of Asia, multiple domestic rails and bilateral connections coexist. Europe’s choice of harmonization has created a genuinely pan European payments market.

Cross border instant payments: the next step

Looking ahead, cross border instant payments represent the next frontier. They also concentrate many of the frictions absent from domestic contexts, from interoperability between fast payment systems to foreign exchange processing outside market hours.

At the same time, digital assets are gradually moving from theoretical debate to practical experimentation. While still at an early stage, emerging use cases all point in the same direction: faster, frictionless payments, available 24/7 throughout the year.

For corporates, these developments offer opportunities to reduce delays and costs, but they also raise important questions around compliance and operational security. For banks, they represent both a challenge and a chance to reassert their strengths, particularly in terms of security, robustness and regulatory expertise, as key differentiators in a rapidly evolving landscape.

1- https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/groups/erpb/shared/pdf/20th-ERPB-meeting/Status_update_on_SCT_Inst_scheme.pdf
2- https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer
3- Application programming interfaces
4- Enterprise Resource Planning