Instant Payments
Instant payments — specifically SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) in the eurozone — are bank transfers that settle in under ten seconds, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Since 9 October 2025, the EU's Instant Payments Regulation requires all eurozone banks to both send and receive instant credit transfers, at no additional cost compared to regular SEPA transfers.
Before this regulation, instant payments were optional. Many banks either did not support them or charged a premium for them, limiting adoption. The mandatory requirement has transformed the practical landscape: property companies can now receive rent payments, settle distributions, and process refunds in real time — without waiting for the next-business-day settlement that characterised traditional SEPA Credit Transfers.
The regulation also mandated Verification of Payee (VoP) — a pre-payment check that matches the recipient's IBAN to their registered name. This feature is critical for property companies processing bulk payments (investor distributions, supplier payments), as it catches errors before money moves rather than after.
For real estate operations, instant payments enable several improvements. Treasury management becomes real-time: when a tenant pays at 11pm on a Saturday, the funds are in your account within seconds, not on Monday morning. Cash flow forecasting improves because payment confirmation is immediate and irrevocable. And settlement risk is essentially eliminated — once an instant payment is confirmed, it cannot be reversed (unlike direct debits and card payments).
Combined with open banking initiation, instant payments create a payment experience that is faster, cheaper, and more transparent than any traditional method — for both the property company and the payer.