This first group of RT1 users is currently completing the required testing for connecting to the platform. A list including most of these early joiners can be found here. Many of these participants have operations in several European countries and plan to extend reach to additional institutions.

RT1 will be used for the 24/7 settlement of real-time payments in line with the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) Scheme of the European Payments Council (EPC). The system will go live on 21 November 2017, the launch date of the SCT Inst Scheme.

“RT1 is real and timely, ready to serve the needs of European payment service providers and their customers from day 1 of the EPC’s SCT Inst Scheme. It is a great pleasure to see this proposition taken up from the start by a substantial group of institutions with wide coverage across SEPA,” said Hays Littlejohn, Chief Executive Officer of EBA CLEARING. “At our Sibos Community session in Toronto next week, several of these frontrunners will give an outlook on upcoming instant payment products and share their views on related use cases and future market developments. Our November go-live will only mark the start of the real-time payments ramp-up in Europe: we expect to see more than 50 early adopters connected to RT1 by mid-2018. By the end of 2018, the participants in the system should represent 80% of our current STEP2 SCT volumes, which gives a good indication of the considerable reach we expect RT1 to build up within the next 12 months.”

Together with 39 funding institutions and its technology partner SIA, EBA CLEARING has been developing and implementing the pan-European infrastructure platform RT1 since April 2016 to provide payment service providers in SEPA with a real-time payment processing facility operating around the clock on any day of the year. RT1 is open to any account-servicing payment provider (AS-PSP) adhering to the EPC SCT Inst Scheme. Different options to interact with the system will allow any type of user access to the platform.