The new platform must provide fast and secure real-time processing of transactions in accordance with the standard established by the European Payments Council for the new payment instrument. CRISTAL Instant Payments will process Instant Payments instructions acquired via the bank's digital channels up to the point of exchange for final settlement. It integrates within the BRED information system in order to post transactions to customers' accounts in real time and to validate compliance with counter-terrorism, anti-money laundering and anti-fraud regulations.

CRISTAL Instant Payments has been defined by the CRISTAL Users Group through working meetings organised by Worldline. It fits in with the technical and business requirements, the main one being to implement agility in response to the uncertainties that remain for both the pace of adoption by end customers and the payment market segments that will be the most strongly impacted.

This requirement is fully supported by the innovative design of CRISTAL Mass Payments Highway, Worldline's retail payment software package that is the proven foundation for CRISTAL Instant Payments.

This design already ensures that CRISTAL Instant Payments will allow many features to be tailored to the specificities of the different types of future use cases and will meet in the long term the challenge of high performance at optimized processing costs. The very high scalability of the software package is an additional asset in the definition of a business model in relation to the pace of the new instrument's adoption.

Rémi Tanon, Head of Innovation and Market Infrastructure Projects at BRED Banque Populaire said: "This project aims at strengthening our leadership position in cash management by offering our customers a modern, secure and instant payment method that will support the development of our innovative digital banking offerings. We chose the Worldline solution because of the relevance of its functional scope and of our successful experience using the Cristal platform".

Pascal Dehaussy, Head of Worldline Financial Services in France said: "We are delighted and honoured by BRED's confidence in selecting our Instant Payments licensed software package. This is a new step in the partnership relationship we have established together years ago. And for Worldline, this represents the outcome of the work performed in order to offer the market a solution that meets the challenges of the new modern payment instrument wanted by the European banking community. It also confirms the leadership position of our CRISTAL licensed software package. "