Iberpay, at the forefront of instant payments in Europe
In November 2017, Iberpay launched the first domestic interbank infrastructure in Europe to process SEPA Instant credit transfers under the EPC's SCT Inst scheme. Likewise, Iberpay launched the first connection with the pan-European services EBA Clearing’s RT1 (November 2017) and Eurosystem’s TIPS of the (November 2018), to guarantee a maximum reachability in the SEPA area from the very first moment.
Iberpay's interbank infrastructure offers a domestic interbank service for SCT Inst processing, and two pan-European connections to process SCT Inst with entities in the SEPA area: Link with TIPS and Link with RT1.
The infrastructure also processes transactions in real-time under three different protocols: web services, SOAP and REST, EBICS and SWIFT-AGI, that position Iberpay as a clear reference in the European context and as one of the most advanced and innovative payment systems today.
Instant payments' interbank infrastructure and services
The success in the launch of Instant credit transfers in Spain has been mainly due to the great majority of Spanish entities adhering to the EPC’s SCT Inst scheme and to Iberpay's SCT Inst services:
These services enable entities to channel all their SCT Inst transactions, whether for domestic or with the rest of the SEPA area, through a single connection with Iberpay's platform, reducing any additional technical, operational or cost efforts.
Since November 21, 2017, Spanish citizens benefit from a new way of sending and receiving money instantly, both to and from other Spanish bank accounts, and to and from accounts in other European countries, by using instant credit transfers.
An instant credit transfer is a transfer of funds that reaches the destination bank account in less than 10 seconds, as defined by the pan-European SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme, published by the EPC in November 2016 and which came into force on 21 November 2017. This maximum target time has been reduced down to 1.5 seconds within the Spanish Payment System (SNCE).
The main characteristics of these instant credit transfers are:
Thanks to the advanced and innovative interbank infrastructure launched by Iberpay and the massive adhesion of entities, Spain has become the first country in the euro area in terms of volumes processed, surpassing the figures of 588 million instant credit transfers processed in 2022, worth over 85,000 million euros.
Iberpay's CICLOM platform processes over 1,5 million instant credit transfers a day on average, worth over 226 million euros, and SCT Inst represent 43% share of the total credit transfers processed daily in the Spanish Payment System.
Evolution of SCT Inst in the Spanish payment sysmtem