EBA Clearings RT1 reaches critical mass in Germany

RT1 has welcomed three additional major German payment market players – Deutsche Bank, DZ BANK and Commerzbank – since November 2019. This has increased to more than 1,700 the number of PSPs in Germany that are addressable via RT1, including the German cooperative sector connected via DZ BANK. The new participants joined UniCredit AG, Hanseatic Bank and the two Landesbanken Helaba and LBBW, which were already active in RT1; the two latter have been connecting the German savings banks sector to the EBA CLEARING system via their payments hubs since mid-2018. Additional German PSPs are scheduled to connect to RT1 in the next few months.

These recent developments in Germany tie in with instant payment roll-out activities of other communities and individual institutions across Europe. In addition to Germany, the ramp-up at country level, as witnessed by RT1, has been gaining steam in Italy, Spain, the Baltics and Austria in particular. As a result, the total number of transactions processed in RT1 tripled from 5 to 15 million between late October 2018 and late February 2019. These 15 million instant payments, of which over 99% were settled and thus final within less than three seconds, had a total value of over EUR 8 billion.

RT1 provides payment service providers in the Single Euro Payments Area with a real-time payment processing facility operating around the clock on any day of the year. The EBA CLEARING platform went live as the first pan-European real-time payment infrastructure system on the launch date of the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) Scheme of the European Payments Council in November 2017.

RT1 participation is open to any account-servicing payment provider (AS-PSP) adhering to the EPC SCT Inst Scheme; the system currently reaches over 2,300 institutions. Different options to interact with the system allow any type of user access to the RT1 platform.