Intesa Sanpaolo and EBA Clearing complete first pan-European instant payment test
Italy’s largest retail bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and EBA Clearing have successfully completed their first user testing activities on Dovetail’s solution for EBA’s pan-European real-time payment platform.
Among the institutions funding the new EBA infrastructure, Intesa Sanpaolo is the first one to connect to the test system. The new infrastructure will provide a real-time payment processing engine “working around the clock on any day of the year”.
Stefano Favale, head of global transaction banking at Intesa Sanpaolo, says the end-to-end process between the originator and beneficiary accounts will “take no more than ten seconds”.
EBA says starting from November 2017, account-servicing payment service providers (AS-PSPs) from all over SEPA will be able to use the solution for payment products in euro that are fully compliant with the European Payments Council’s SCT Inst Scheme and in line with the ISO 20022 global messaging standards for real-time payments.
Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA Clearing, adds that Intesa Sanpaolo is amongst 25 users currently preparing to go live this year and “together with those institutions that are planning to connect to the system in 2018, these early joiners represent nearly 85% of the SEPA Credit Transfer traffic processed by our STEP2 system today”.
Dovetail’s tale
Intesa Sanpaolo and Dovetail embarked on a major SEPA payments project in 2012. At the time, it was a rare instance of an Italian bank opting for anything other than an in-house or local solution.
The first domestic go-live took place in November that year, and since then Dovetail’s system has been rolled out across the international locations of the Intesa Sanpaolo group, replacing nearly 30 legacy payments applications.
It covers high value, low volume and high volume, low value payments, and is supported by one centralised hub.
