This is the result of a survey conducted jointly by EBA and the Hamburg-based consulting and software company PPI AG, whose final report “Request to Pay: What corporates want" is now available.

Companies from 20 countries responded to the detailed questionnaire between September 2020 and February 2021, with ten selected companies additionally participating in structured interviews. The attitude of the business community toward RTP was clear: almost 100 % of companies have an interest in using the standard and consider it important to ensure that it is implemented uniformly across Europe. "This huge interest in RTP is a clear signal to financial institutions that they will find customers for RTP services and products. The market is there - it just needs to be served", says Dr Hubertus von Poser, member of the executive board of PPI AG, where he is responsible for the payments sector.

A wide range of use scenarios
For the survey the companies were asked about their willingness to use RTP. Four fields of application were proposed: point of sale (POS), e-commerce, e-invoicing and recurring payments. In all of them, more than 80 % of the respondents could at least imagine a use, in e-commerce even more than 90 %. In order to facilitate or accelerate the introduction of RTP, companies believe that further improvement measures should be implemented in different areas. This includes the standardisation of procedures, value-added services, end user acceptance, risk management and future prospects. The last point also includes the most common wishes for additional features: rapid achievement of high market penetration, the use in combination with instant payments or other payment guarantee options as well as the integration into standardised, fully automatic processes that are connected to ERP systems, for example. "We at the EBA look forward to shaping a constructive dialogue between the supply and demand side that will help RTP become an important part of the pan-European payments ecosystem after a very promising start", explains Thomas Egner, Secretary General of the EBA.

Additional messaging channel
In addition to the requested areas of application, the European companies see even further possibilities for the new standard. RTP should, for example, also enable C2C payments. In certain scenarios, it is conceivable to expand the system to include machine-to-machine (M2M) payments. Further potential lies in the use of RTP in the payment of arrears or in the follow-up of direct debit returns. At the same time, RTP is seen as an additional communication channel to the end customer. For example, 43 % of respondents could imagine transferring warranty or return information with the data record. "Services surrounding RTP only make sense if they bring real added value, eliminate current problems in the payments procedure and can be easily integrated into the users’ processes. The answers provided by the survey participants reveal a whole range of practical improvements that we will consider for the future", says PPI expert von Poser.