Instant Payment: Work Underway for Arkéa

Instant Payment services have started to gain traction in a certain number of European countries, and is taking its first steps in France. Work is in progress at some French banking groups, including BPCE, and as announced last year. The latest example to date: Arkéa Banking Services unveils a platform to connect to the interbank RT1 system for Instant Payments.

Work had been underway for one year and Arkéa Banking Services announces they will be connected to the French platform developed by Stet as of July. This institution will first propose a service for receiving payments, the issuing side should be added by the end of the year. They would wait until enough banks are connected to reach the critical mass of accessible customers.

This subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa focusing on white-label banking services, will provide their customers (Payment Institutions and FinTech) with the ability to connect to the interbank exchange platform so they can design their own offers and meet expectations expressed by their individual customers, when it comes to instant payments.

This offer will be made available this Fall; the British start-ups Nuapay (PI founded by Sentinel) and Vitesse PSP Limited will be the first to use it.

Comments – Instant Payment: banks in working order

Developments are in progress in France to propose instant payment services, but this new method still has to be clearly outlined in terms of use cases, business models and even the issues at stake. Yet, some banking institutions have expressed their intent to make room for it. BPCE, for instance, has been proposing an industrial infrastructure for receiving and issuing instant credit transfers since April: the first use case has been featured through their partnership with Transferwise. In the meantime, the BRED selected Worldline to implement their Instant Payment platform. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa will be one of the first banks to connect to Stet’s platform. They will also allow their customers to send instant credit transfers via the Paylib entre amis app which relies on their mobile phone. The group is now considering value-added services to make their offer more profitable.

European success. This new payment system has been particularly successful in some European countries. In the UK, Faster Payments accounts for 17% of all account-to-account transactions, or more than 1.7 billion processed operations. The Swedish solution Swish, for its part, reports more than 9 million payments each month, and is now used by half of the local population.