EBA Clearing has signed a letter of intent with Italian ACH SIA to develop a pan-European real-time payment system by the fourth quarter of 2017.
SIA was identified as the preferred provider for the delivery project during a Request for Proposal process launched in October 2015.
The new plaform will be geared at handling any euro transactions that conform with the instant payment definition and requirements formulated by the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) in late 2014, says EBA Clearing. It will be developed in line with the global messaging standards for instant payments (ISO 20022) and fully compliant with the SCTInst Scheme that is being created by the European Payments Council (EPC).
Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA Clearing says: “As a next step, we are now inviting interested payment service providers to join our initiative. We look forward to working with SIA and these pilot users on the development of a platform that can be used for instant payments both at a domestic and cross-border level.”
The delivery of an instant payment system would be the second major market infrastructure development project conducted by EBA Clearing in co-operation with SIA following the implementation of the Step2 Sepa platform for mass payments in euro, which processes over 40 million transactions per day on average.
Progress in instant payments will be a key theme of EBAday 2016, the eleventh annual transaction banking and payments conference run by Finextra and the Euro Banking Association which is taking place this year in Milan from 7-8 June.