Study: Instant Payments

This study by Eurogroup Consulting (EGC) in cooperation with the Austrian National Bank and two universities reveals clear advantages of the use of SCT Inst for all stakeholders as well as for the competitiveness of the SEPA economic area as a whole:

Consumers expect convenience, easy and fast handling, security, no costs, consumer protection and added value. The success of digital ecosystems and payment embedded in marketplaces show the advantage of convenient payments without media discontinuity.

Merchants expect low costs, free choice of service providers and transaction bundling. Low costs and a wide choice of service providers as well as strong branding increase acceptance in retail. New payment models become possible due to the change in acquiring.

Issuers expect reuse of existing SCT infrastructures and high end-customer relevance. SCT Inst is the logical further development of existing SCT infrastructures and enables the reuse of investments made with little additional effort. Issuers can reduce their processing costs by up to a factor of 14 compared to ICS debit (International Card Schemes).

Instant Payments (IP) have the potential to replace card, cash and other payment methods. In Austria and Germany, more than 40% of merchant sales can be substituted by IP in the future, with a focus on debit card potential.

Request-to-pay can enable easy communication between customer wallet and merchant. User-friendly solutions to request and initiate a payment at the point of sale (POS) create applications with high convenience and speed.

Issuer-merchant partnerships offer added value to customers and create use cases with higher customer loyalty, acceptance of IP as a payment instrument and potential additional revenues. Issuer and merchant. These can generate new business and remuneration models through bilateral and multilateral agreements.

Silos break down, flat and simple structures emerge. Account-to-account payment methods create alternatives to established card processes and traditional payment silos. Superfluous layers and service modules are eliminated, entrenched structures are opened up and more competition and innovation emerge.

Examples of applied IP in Europe are already being planned and implemented. With the EMPSA members (European Mobile Payment Systems Association) as a “bottom-up” example of applied IP and the EPI (European Payments Initiative) as a pan-European approach, there are already examples of innovative payment solutions based on existing account infrastructure.

The combination of open banking and IP generates new use cases and creates investment security for players. Uniform rules and fair distribution of revenues create investment security and an equal playing field for issuers, merchants and FinTechs.

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Study partners:

Eurogroup Consulting (EGC)
Oesterreichische Nationalbank