EBA CLEARING’s RT1 reaches critical mass of Belgian PSPs for instant payments

EBA CLEARING announced today that its RT1 platform has reached critical mass in Belgium for instant payments. The leading pan-European instant payment infrastructure system currently counts six participants based in Belgium: Aion SA, BNP Paribas Fortis, Belfius, CBC Banque, ING Belgium and KBC Bank. Thanks to this coverage, the vast majority of Belgian payment accounts are now reachable for euro instant payments from all across Europe.

With this latest development, RT1 has established critical mass for instant payments in 11 countries throughout the continent, including Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Spain.

RT1 currently counts 76 participants across Europe, which extend reach to 2,588 Addressable Payment Service Providers (PSPs) from 24 different SEPA countries listed in the routing table of the system. Together, these PSPs account for over 75% of the regular SEPA credit transfers EBA CLEARING processes today. The RT1 system presently handles over 1 million transactions per day, with high performance levels.  Each transaction is processed in around one second on average.

“KBC is proud to be one of the funding institutions of the RT1 platform. Joining RT1 in 2019 gave our customers the unique possibilities offered by this modern payment technology all across Europe. KBC made instant payments the new normal both for its private and its corporate clients. As a result, a large part of the payments within KBC are already carried out as instant payment. Thanks to instant payments and the RT1 platform, we were able to create a European instant and frictionless payment experience for all our customers,”

said Ivo De Meersman, General Manager of Payments & Cards, KBC Bank and Member of the Board of Directors of EBA CLEARING.

“We are very proud to be one of the first Belgian banks to have introduced instant payments on the Belgian market. Thanks to our participation in RT1 of EBA CLEARING, we achieved the harmonisation of the customer experience used for domestic instant payments since March 2019 by ensuring cross-border reachability, speed and 24/7 execution,”

said Amaury Vanthournout, Product Area Lead, Payments, ING Belgium.

“We are very pleased that PSPs across Europe can now reach a critical mass of payment accounts in Belgium via RT1. This marks another important milestone in the successful collaborative build-up of instant payment reach. We will continue our efforts with market players all across Europe to further increase this reach, which is a major pre-requisite for the Europe-wide uptake of instant payments by businesses and consumers,”

said Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA CLEARING.

RT1 provides payment service providers in the Single Euro Payments Area with a real-time payment processing facility operating around the clock on any day of the year for payments in line with the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) Scheme of the European Payments Council. Payments in RT1 are settled in real-time with immediate finality.

RT1 is open to any account-servicing payment service provider (AS-PSP) adhering to the EPC SCT Inst Scheme. A variety of options to interact with the system allow any type of EPC SCT Inst Scheme adherent to access the RT1 platform in the way that best suits their needs.

An overview of the RT1 access and participation model, as well as the list of RT1 participants and a document including all payment service providers addressable through the system are respectively available at:

https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/instant-payments/access-models/

https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/instant-payments/participants/

An interactive map documenting the quarterly evolution of the RT1 reach for each European country and featuring user testimonials on RT1 and R2P, the Company’s upcoming request to pay messaging service, can be found at https://r2p-ebaclearing.eu.