Visa rolls out real-time payments platform in Europe

The Empire strikes back (at PSD2)?.. Once, a similar platform for A2A payments is implemented, merchants will have an interesting choice.

Interesting to see how this compares with SCTinst based products (the imminent universal, open account to account standard in Europe); the card channel is already connected to merchants through an extensive network and this may be useful for refunds and a couple of other "quasi-push" payment use cases, it is hardly a univerasl payment instrument. If enabling cross-currency flows this may also be an advantage over ACH (for now). Howevre, high value B2B payments would be quite risky or necessitate unusual levels of guarantees from Visa and/or Issuers on a system unless the underlying DNS settlment is upgraded to mirror the central bank-backed mechanism used by ACHs for Instant Payments. It delivers value to the payer in a leisurely 30 minutes making it not ideal for DVP based payments in the B2B, C2B and SMe domains.

I'm not convinced about what Finextra reports on the B2B Visa Direct solution.

As far as I understand, Visa Direct enables a sort of "card-to-card push payments" only for the B2C and P2P case, that's in the case where the beneficiary has its own Card Account (in US a prepaid card).