EBA Clearing’s real-time payment system reaches critical mass in Germany

EBA Clearing has announced that its instant payment system RT1 has further expanded its coverage in the German market and now reaches a critical mass of payment service providers (PSPs) operating in Germany. With this large-scale connection to EBA Clearing’s pan-European infrastructure platform, the German banking community has laid the foundation for rolling out euro real-time payment products and services to its customers nationwide.

RT1 has welcomed three additional German payment market players – Deutsche Bank, DZ BANK and Commerzbank – since November 2018. This has increased to more than 1,700 the number of PSPs in Germany that are addressable via RT1, including the German cooperative sector connected via DZ BANK. The new participants joined UniCredit AG, Hanseatic Bank and the two Landesbanken Helaba and LBBW, which were already active in RT1. The latter two institutions have been connecting the German savings banks sector to the EBA Clearing system via their payments hubs since mid-2018. Additional German PSPs are scheduled to connect to RT1 in the next few months.

These recent developments in Germany tie in with instant payment rollout activities of other communities and individual institutions across Europe. In addition to Germany, the ramp-up at country level, as witnessed by RT1, has been gaining positive momentum in Italy, Spain, the Baltics and Austria in particular. As a result, the total number of transactions processed in RT1 tripled from 5 to 15 million between late October 2018 and late February 2019. These 15 million instant payments, of which over 99% were settled and thus final within less than three seconds, had a total value of over €8bn.