EU Commission SCT Inst Mandate: How to choose the most efficient strategy and maximise on the benefits

Listen to ESBG-WSBI, Bottomline and The Paypers as they address the main barriers to adoption for instant payments and recommend the best next steps to build on the advantages that Instant Payments provides across your whole payments ecosystem:

• What are the main barriers to adoption?
• Which strategies will best address these pain points, including the option to transition to SaaS or choose a sponsor bank model?
• Case studies: How have the banks on our panel prioritised their instant payments roadmaps, and what lessons have they learned?
• What are the key benefits of adopting instant payments and what is the business case for doing this ASAP before the mandate deadline?

The mandate is likely to be approved in mid-October/early November 2023. So, PSPs in the EU need to be equipped to receive Instant Payments six months after the legislation is passed and be able to send Instant Payments a year after ratification (EEA is 30 months and 36 months, respectively). There are tight deadlines, and there are additional requirements added for pricing, pre-validation, and sanction screening to adhere to as well. Whilst these timelines are already ambitious for some banks and FIs, it is these two additional requirements below that are causing the most concerns:

• Increasing trust in instant payments, with an obligation on providers to verify the match between the bank account number (IBAN) and the name of the beneficiary provided by the payer to alert the payer of a possible mistake or fraud before the payment is made, e.g., Confirmation of Payee
• Removing friction in the processing of instant euro payments while preserving the effectiveness of screening persons subject to EU sanctions, through a procedure whereby PSPs will verify, at least daily, their clients against EU sanctions lists, instead of screening all transactions one by one.

In fact, 44% of all respondents to our poll said that they were still waiting for guidance and a clear definition of the above before they could get started. The good news is that Bottomline has the experience you can leverage - over 50% of all ‘live’ participants of Confirmation of Payee in the UK have gone ‘live’ with Bottomline & our sanction screening tools are used by 200+ customers globally.

However, there are still the traditional barriers to adoption of Instant Payments that need to be overcome - 56% said that lack of IT resources & prioritisation with an already busy roadmap was the most significant barrier to the adoption of Instant Payments, followed by legacy infrastructure at 31% and the cost & hassle of implementing a new payment rail coming in at 14%.