Brussels, 26 October 2022: ETPPA welcomes today’s legislative proposal from the European Commission for a regulation on Instant Payments. Instant Payments has long been the missing brick in the PSD2 ecosystem and there has been a clear need for swift legislation here in order to help Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) and fintechs in general leverage the huge investments already made into PSD2 infrastructure.
ETPPA commends the Commission’s proposal for mandating retail banks to enable not just reachability, but also outgoing instant payments and – most importantly – to remove any premium fees over standard transfers, which means that they will be free in most cases. This is crucial to ensure that the true benefits of instant payments can be made available to all EU consumers. ETPPA would call on the co-legislators to support this mandate and to ensure the certainty of instant payments, thereby future proofing the EU’s retail payments market so that it can compete globally.
PISPs, but also many Payment Institutions, E-money Institutions and banks, stand ready to leverage their huge investments into PSD2-related API infrastructure in combination with the superior functionalities of instant payments. In particular, their much lower non-execution risk versus a non-instant payment initiation, will lead to a significant growth of PISPs and their services across Europe.
Today’s proposal on Instant Payments is essential for new or improved European payment solutions, such as ETPPA’s European Retail Payments Framework (ERPF). ETPPA’s Chair Ralf Ohlhausen stated that “today’s proposal on Instant Payments will provide some of the key missing ingredients for EU TPPs and fintechs to thrive. Instant Payments must be free to the payer and final to the payee for EU retail payment solutions to be able to compete with those from the East and West. In combination with the PSD2 API infrastructure, which we implemented over the last 5 years, the proposed regulation on Instant Payments will help enable more than 400m EU citizens in all member states making retail payments straight from their bank account, without the need for any additional card or wallet. This is a great step forward towards fostering EU champions in payment services.”
ETPPA looks forward to continued collaboration on the proposal with the European Commission and co-legislators, and we eagerly await a swift adoption of this positive and timely legislative proposal.