24 PSPs support delivery of pan-European Request to Pay infrastructure solution by EBA CLEARING

EBA CLEARING announced today that 24 payment service providers from 11 countries have confirmed their intention to support the delivery of a pan-European Request to Pay (R2P) infrastructure solution.

The announcement followed an extensive user consultation on an R2P blueprint created by a dedicated EBA CLEARING task force from November 2018 to March 2019. As the blueprint had been well-received by its user community, the leading private-industry provider of pan-European payment infrastructure solutions issued a call for action in April 2019 to rally the necessary support for the development of the proposed solution.  

The EBA CLEARING blueprint sets out a thin-layer infrastructure solution that will be based on real-time messaging and separated both from the services solutions and payment infrastructure layers. The solution is aimed at accommodating both existing and future Request to Pay end-user products and services, regardless of the underlying use case. To this effect, it is expected to allow both ‘Approve Now’ and ‘Approve Later’ responses from the payer.

“We believe that a use case-agnostic pan-European R2P infrastructure solution will be a crucial part of the toolset PSPs need to unlock the full potential of instant payments.

It is great to see that 24 of our users have already confirmed their support of this development project; we expect that more will follow shortly and will be very happy to welcome them too. Our plan is to deliver before the end of 2020 a solution that is perfectly aligned with the work at the EPC, and that fully satisfies the needs of the emerging pan-European real-time payments ecosystem,”

said Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA CLEARING.

“The diversity of our supporting institutions’ geographical coverage, size and key customer segments will help to make our R2P solution both very versatile and truly pan-European. Their input to the specifications process should further increase the attractiveness of the solution for the wider market.

We are eager to kick off the development of this service, which will be open to any PSP adhering to the future Request to Pay scheme arrangements, and to ensure that the specifications are made available in due course,”

said Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management, EBA CLEARING.

Request to Pay is considered as a key element in an evolving payments landscape shaped by developments such as open banking and real-time payments. Request to Pay solutions can increase certainty, transparency and convenience of payment processes, for instance by speeding up the end-to-end process and easing reconciliation.

Scheme-related work on the Request to Pay functionality is ongoing at the level of the European Payments Council (EPC). EBA CLEARING contributes to these efforts as part of the Request-To-Pay Multi-Stakeholder Group of the EPC and intends to completely align its solution to the EPC work.

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