Request to pay: Monetising the instant payments investment

For the past few years, payment service providers (PSPs) have come together in an attempt to harmonise European instant payments. At the back end, the effort undertaken to transform PSPs’ internal processes and the underlying payment infrastructures to transact in real time has been impressive; however, despite the significant costs associated with this back-end modernisation, pan-European front-end payment solutions capable of fully leveraging instant payments — and the accompanying investment — are yet to be realised. This paper proposes that the solution to this problem is implementing a request to pay messaging layer between existing end-user payment interfaces and PSPs’ SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) settlement layer. This layer would be used for the secure exchange of messages before the payment is executed to facilitate pan-European request to pay type solutions. This approach promises not only to bring the full value of SCT Inst to consumers, promoting increased levels of certainty, transparency and convenience, but also empowers PSPs to monetise their instant payment investments by enabling them to offer integrated value-added services to their customers around the payment process. This is the missing piece of the puzzle for European payments, and its implementation should prove a crucial step towards attaining a ‘complete’ European payments ecosystem.