ECB’s pan-European instant payments service goes live
The battle for paytech dominance continues as the European Central Bank (ECB) has launched its pan-European service for settling electronic payments instantly.
Europe takes on US and China
Target instant payment settlement (TIPS) uses central bank money to settle payments individually in “less than ten seconds”.
The go-live can be seen as Europe’s chance to fight back against the US titans of Amazon, Facebook, Google and PayPal – and not forgetting of course China’s Alibaba and Tencent. That’s quite a powerful assembly.
Anyway, in terms of Europe the first transaction took place immediately, when a client of the Spanish bank, CaixaBank, used TIPS to make an instant payment to a client of the French bank, Natixis.
Together with Abanca Corporación Bancaria, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, Banco de Crédito Social Cooperativo, Berlin Hyp, Caja Laboral Popular Cooperativa de Crédito and Teambank, they are the first banks to join TIPS.
ECB is in a sales pitch mood as it says banks across Europe can now follow the lead of France, Germany and Spain, which have already connected to TIPS, by linking to the platform and developing solutions that support the take-up of instant payments.
Swift has also joined in the promotion and reveals the implementation of its messaging service for TIPS.
SwiftNet Instant solution is designed as a “key building block for access to the future Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway (ESMIG)”.
It reckons the next major milestone for ESMIG will be the technical consolidation of Target2 and Target2-Securities in 2021.
Swift explains that it is a partner to the Eurosystem, the sole provider of connectivity for Target2, “key provider” of connectivity to Target2-Securities (T2S) and now also a provider for TIPS.
