The total number of transactions processed in EBA Clearing’s instant payment system, RT1, tripled from five to 15 million between late October 2018 and late February 2019.
EBA Clearing also found these 15 million instant payments had a total value of over €8 billion.
RT1 has welcomed three additional major German payment market players—Deutsche Bank, DZ BANK and Commerzbank—since November 2018.
This has increased to more than 1,700 the number of payment service providers (PSPs) in Germany that are addressable via RT1, including the German cooperative sector connected via DZ Bank.
Additional German PSPs are scheduled to connect to RT1 in the next few months.
The EBA Clearing platform went live as the first pan-European real-time payment infrastructure system on the launch date of the single euro payments area (SEPA) Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) Scheme of the European Payments Council in November 2017.
According to EBA Clearing said: “These recent developments in Germany tie in with instant payment roll-out activities of other communities and individual institutions across Europe.”
It added: “In addition to Germany, the ramp-up at a country level, as witnessed by RT1, has been gaining steam in Italy, Spain, the Baltics and Austria, in particular.”
Jürgen Kaczmarek, head of operations management, payments and accounts of DZ Bank AG, said: “Around 900 cooperative banks in Germany have been reachable via instant payment since November 2018 and can receive SEPA instant credit transfers.”
He added: “For DZ BANK, instant payments are a central building block in the payments business, which is why we are working intensively on active reachability. In the course of this spring, about 30 million customers of the cooperative banks will be able to initiate real-time payments.”
Stefan Wloch, managing director, group services banking operations at Commerzbank AG, commented: “From our point of view, market penetration is crucial for instant payments. It takes quite a few participating institutions to ensure that customers get the money in their accounts within a few seconds.”
He added: “The number of banks offering the service is now sufficiently high for customers to be able to use it at a large scale. Customers of Commerzbank can receive payments in real time as of now.”
Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA Clearing, said: “Thanks to the tremendous support of our multinational user community, RT1 currently reaches practically all PSPs actively using the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme. That corresponds to 60 percent of all PSPs operating in SEPA.”
He added: “The substantial onboarding of German banks onto RT1 is a spectacular example confirming that the instant payment take-up across Europe has been making great strides. We are happy to provide a resilient backbone for the processing of these soaring transaction volumes.”
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