EBA CLEARING Advances R2P Infrastructure Solution

Pan-European payment infrastructure provider EBA CLEARING is rolling out a new request to pay (R2P) solution supported by 26 payment service providers (PSPs) from 11 countries, the company said in a press release on Wednesday (Sept. 18).

With the R2P solution anticipated to go live in the second half of 2020, the company held a launch meeting in Frankfurt on Tuesday (Sept. 17) and released a white paper about R2P and the benefits PSPs will experience by having a real-time messaging solution.

“As detailed in our white paper, we believe the time is right for putting into reality a pan-European request to pay solution that allows existing end-user solutions to interconnect and, at the same time, provides the basis for the development of new pan-European payment solutions,” said EBA CLEARING CEO Hays Littlejohn.

R2P is deemed an essential component of the fluctuating payments arena shaped by innovations like real-time payment and open banking. Accelerating the end-to-end process is just one of the many benefits of having an R2P option.

“Together with our funding institutions, we now have taken the first practical step towards delivering this pan-European request to pay solution. In our white paper, we explain why our users are keen to work on request to pay and why now,” said Erwin Kulk, head of service development and management at EBA CLEARING. “We are very happy that a representative group of our users supports the development phase of this project, and we look forward to working with them towards a go-live of the solution in the second half of 2020.”

European banks have increasingly used faster payments since the November 2017 launch of EBA CLEARING’s RT1 instant payments system. Even as financial institutions (FIs) embrace faster payment rails, though, they face an age-old problem: fraud. Keeping transactions secure can be especially tricky when they are sent, received and verified within just 20 seconds.

Banks, FinTechs and other financial players that wish to adopt instant payments must have the infrastructure to handle their speed and provide the necessary security.