From speed to trust: The real challenge in Europe’s instant payments evolution
Domestic speed, cross-border friction
As Europe’s payments landscape continues its evolution toward broadscale real-time capabilities, domestic speed is no longer the bottleneck. Under the 2025 SEPA Instant rulebook, the payer’s Payment Service Provider (PSP), the payee’s PSP and the clearing and settlement mechanism have a combined nine seconds to credit the payee’s account. This is well inside the ten-second hard limit set by the EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR).
With domestic speed largely solved, the next challenge is cross-border real-time. The architecture for cross-border reach already exists; Swift connects more than 11,000 institutions across 200+ countries, and the migration to ISO 20022 has harmonized the message standard end-to-end. What is missing is real-time settlement across that reach. Swift gpi has dramatically improved transparency and speed for correspondent payments, with most cross-border transactions now credited within minutes, but “minutes” is not “instant.” Meanwhile, domestic instant schemes like SEPA Instant, FedNow, UPI, and PIX operate as fast islands with no native bridges between them. The result: banks plug into Swift for reach and into each domestic scheme for speed, and corporates feel the gap every time a payment crosses a border.
The biggest impact is in corporate treasury. Instant settlement unlocks real value for payroll, supplier discounting and intra-day cash management by removing the ambiguity over settlement timing. Today, treasurers can do this within a single domestic scheme but lose the capability the moment a payment goes cross border. The result is a two-speed treasury: one for domestic flows where timing is certain, another for cross-border flows where it still must be estimated. Cross-border instant payments will be a steeper climb than domestic has been, and the banks that solve both – domestic execution today and a credible cross-border roadmap tomorrow – will be the ones treasurers consolidate their wallet around.
Beyond speed: trust layer that banks still need to build
Banks already have the building blocks. A2A overlays (e.g., Wero, Bizum and others), Pay-by-Bank and Request-to-Pay are live today on domestic instant rails, and in several markets, they are starting to take meaningful share from cards in e-commerce and bill payment. Cross-border interoperability is what will turn these from local propositions into a genuine alternative to global card networks – and the loyalty and wallet share prize that comes with it.
Less than half of consumers feel that real-time payments are safer than credit cards, and according to the EBA, fraud risk for instant transfers is up to 10 times higher than standard transactions, thanks to shortened settlement cycles and irrevocability. Siloed cross-border payment structures increase this risk: fraud controls are configured differently across schemes, limiting the industry’s ability to respond collectively.
Domestic instant payments have largely solved the speed problem; accountability is a different question. The IPR has moved the industry forward, but the framework is still uneven inside SEPA, and any cross-border extension will inherit those gaps rather than start clean. Imperfect as it is, cards offer consumers an accountability framework that works almost anywhere in the world. We are not quite there with instant payments.
This article was previously published by Business@EBAday 2026.
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