TIPS system for instant pan-European payments is now live in Spain, Germany, France

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:eyes: :newspaper: A bit behind the curve as it happened 4 days ago but

ECB goes live with pan-European instant payments

The European Central Bank (ECB) has launched an innovative pan-European service for settling electronic payments instantly. TARGET instant payment settlement (TIPS) uses central bank money to settle payments individually in less than 10 seconds.

TIPS went live on Friday, 30 November 2018. 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.

The new service is offered at an attractive price. Operating under the principle of full cost recovery, TIPS has no entry or maintenance fees for account holders. The price per initiated transaction is set at €0.002 for the first two years of operation, with no charges for the first ten million payments settled on each TIPS account by the end of 2019.

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 user-friendly solutions that support the take-up of instant payments by appealing to both retailers and consumers.

I am not quite sure if this is going to just replace SEPA but it does sound exciting!

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Always good to see payment systems finally become that bit more modern!

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SEPA Inst (on top of which TIPS is based) is pretty modern in my view, but yes any technological innovation that aims at speeding things up and standardization of the process is much welcome indeed.

Transparent pricing is also very welcome :slight_smile:

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SEPA Inst is absurdly expensive, so this will probably be even more expensive…

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0.002 eur/transaction - it has a transparent pricing… I think it is not ridiculous to charge two centi-pence? :man_shrugging:

Most banks still charge £20 for Swift transfers (just checked Nationwide)… so this is 10000 cheaper (obviously unfair comparison as I’m comparing Switft end-customer price with TIPS inter-bank fee, e.g. banks will probably charge on top of it, but still give overall feeling of prices as SWIFT is expensive (and very not transparent as banks tend to have different “trade secret” agreements with it))

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I don’t know how much SEPA Inst costs to banks, but when you have a couple banks where it’s free and others that charge from 1.5 to 2 Euros, the amount banks charge to costumers doesn’t seem to have any correlation with real costs