At EBAday 2017, speakers and delegates discussed the many accelerating changes affecting the traditional payments landscape today. One of the topics that attracted the most interest was the prospect of instant payments becoming available at a large scale soon, both to customers within Europe and beyond.

As real-time payment systems are proliferating and payment service providers are starting to get ready to connect to this emerging infrastructure, reach and interoperability-related topics are moving more and more to the forefront of the industry's concerted activities.

In order to pave the way for a broad, quick and efficient roll-out of real-time payments, PSPs are looking into easy access and connection models with their infrastructure providers and technology partners. Infrastructure providers are, at the same time, working on establishing interoperability between their respective systems and, where relevant and feasible, seeking alignment on system-related technicalities that have an impact on infrastructure users.

Contributing to a harmonised real-time payment ecosystem based, where possible, on uniform standards and best practice in the infrastructure space is one of the goals of the Euro Banking Association (EBA).

Therefore, the EBA has dedicated its next educational event entirely to the topic of real-time payments. For the first time ever, an EBA seminar will take place outside of Europe, a move that emphasises the importance of exchanges on global harmonisation in the payments area and collaboration to this effect.

Fifteen lecturers from Europe and the USA, from large and medium-sized financial institutions, as well as technology and infrastructure providers will interact in depth, together with the delegates, how current and upcoming real-time payment schemes and infrastructure solutions work and what the benefits and challenges are, as well as the expectations of different types of stakeholders, i.e. consumers, SMEs, large corporates, institutions, central banks and governments.

The EBA hopes that this educational seminar will help delegates to get a clearer picture of the tasks still ahead considering the imminent launch of instant and real-time payments in Europe and the US respectively.

The seminar "Real-Time Payments – New Realities, New Challenges" will be held in New York, NY, USA, on 11th and 12th October 2017. Don't miss it!