Instant payments
Over the past two decades, there has been incredible growth in the number of instant payment services offered in countries across the world.
Consumers and businesses in over 80 economies can now transfer funds account-to-account in a matter of seconds, twenty-four hours a day, all year round which supports domestic economic development by speeding up transactions and unlocking exciting new business opportunities.
Instant payments
In this section
Enabling domestic instant payments
Market infrastructures are expected to meet a global demand to pay, and be paid, instantly. Although approaches can differ, the key requirements and objectives are the same: To deliver real-time value around the clock, increase payment efficiency, and boost innovation while staying secure and compliant.
Interoperability between instant payment systems
How we’re helping interlink instant payments systems and unlocking instant payments across borders.
Leveraging our unique payment expertise
Swift has been supporting the financial community to implement and access instant payment initiatives around the world.
For instance, we helped to design, build and launch Australia’s transformative New Payment Platform (NPP), and continue to play a key role in its operations.
We also offer our community direct access to Europe’s TARGET Instant Payments Settlement (TIPS), EBA CLEARING’s pan-European RT1 instant payment system, as well as Buna, the cross-border and multi-currency payment system founded by the Arab Monetary Fund.
Enabling instant payments across borders
While many countries and regions have implemented instant payments systems within their own jurisdictions, these services generally don’t allow users to receive payments from overseas. This is now set to change.
Governments are introducing regulatory changes to allow instant payments systems to receive cross-border payments, and numerous initiatives are ongoing to interlink systems around the world. And we’re playing a key role in supporting our community to enable instant payments around the clock.
This will enable cross-border payments destined for, or leaving Europe, to reach beneficiaries in mere seconds while remaining in full compliance with the European Payment Council’s (EPC) OCT Inst scheme.
What are instant payments?
Instant payments are a form of credit transfer whereby funds pass from the payer’s to the payee’s account in a matter of seconds, at any time, day or night, on any day of the year.
This distinguishes instant payments from other credit transfers, which are typically processed by payment service providers, during business hours, with a deferred crediting of the funds to the payee.