EBA Clearing finds support for pan-European Request to Pay infrastructure solution

EBA Clearing has announced that 24 payment service providers from 11 countries have confirmed their intention to support the delivery of a pan-European Request to Pay (R2P) infrastructure solution.

The announcement followed an extensive user consultation on an R2P blueprint created by a dedicated EBA Clearing task force from November 2018 to March 2019. As the blueprint had been well-received by its user community, the private-industry provider of pan-European payment infrastructure solutions issued a call for action in April 2019 to rally the necessary support for the development of the proposed solution.

The EBA Clearing blueprint sets out a thin-layer infrastructure solution that will be based on real-time messaging and separated both from the services solutions and payment infrastructure layers. The solution is aimed at accommodating both existing and future R2P end-user products and services, regardless of the underlying use case. To this effect, it is expected to allow both ‘Approve Now’ and ‘Approve Later’ responses from the payer.

R2P is considered as a key element in an evolving payments landscape shaped by developments such as open banking and real-time payments. Solutions of this kind are designed to increase certainty, transparency and convenience of payment processes, for instance by speeding up the end-to-end process and easing reconciliation.

Scheme-related work on the R2P functionality is ongoing at the level of the European Payments Council (EPC). EBA Clearing contributes to these efforts as part of the Request-To-Pay Multi-Stakeholder Group of the EPC and intends to completely align its solution to the EPC work.