Payments in the 24/7 economy

The importance of instant payments in payment transactions is growing. In the first half of 2025, around 26 percent of all SEPA transfers were processed as real-time payments. Since October 2025, banks have been required to offer real-time transfers in euros, so usage is likely to continue to rise. What initially applied to private customers and 24/7 online commerce is increasingly becoming the standard in the corporate sector as well.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has been pushing ahead with the development of an open financial architecture. The second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) laid the foundation for this. SEPA created a single European payments area in 2017. The Instant Payment Regulation (IPR) of 2024 extends this to include the obligation to carry out real-time transactions in euros without any amount limit. It is therefore likely to become a catalyst for the spread and acceptance of instant payments.

Brief overview

For private customers, the convenience aspect is the main focus when it comes to real-time payments: the digital customer journey that customers experience in online retail or peer-to-peer payments is being transferred to banking. For businesses, instant payments provide a faster overview and more effective control over their financial situation.

The advantages of real-time financial management are obvious: the elimination of time restrictions such as cut-off times allows time-critical transactions to be processed directly, enabling customer refunds to be made promptly, for example, or customer payments to be received within seconds. Liquidity can be concentrated in real time across banks, companies, and countries where it is needed. Against the backdrop of volatile market conditions and increased uncertainty, this is an aspect that is likely to gain in importance.

Instant payment processes in treasury therefore offer advantages, but also require adjustments to be made to processes. For example, it must be clarified how payments outside normal working hours are to be handled.

The speed of processing also increases the risk of fraud. Instant payments cannot be reversed, making it difficult to correct errors or fraud.

Against this backdrop, the IPR requires the introduction of Verification of Payee (VoP) checks for all SEPA transactions: banks and payment service providers must compare the recipient's name and IBAN. This is intended to prevent manual input errors and ward off phishing attacks, such as fraudulent instructions issued in the name of executives, as in the case of so-called CEO fraud.

Treasury is particularly important in VoP when it comes to processing collective transfers, i.e., so-called batches, as used for supplier or salary payments. Since an error message for a single transaction can delay the entire batch, corporate customers have the option of excluding the VoP check. However, this “opt-out” must be made consciously and defined for the respective collective transaction. Regardless of the approach, the use of the VoP check fundamentally places special demands on data consistency and accuracy in treasury.

Instant payments bring innovations and challenges for companies. The effort is worthwhile, as it allows the potential of liquidity management to be exploited to the full.

This article was first published in "Der Treasurer", Edition 04/2025.