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Europe’s payments industry is approaching a structural inflection point.
SEPA Instant payments
New research conducted by Celent in collaboration with Plaid, suggests that SEPA Instant Credit Transfers are on track to overtake traditional credit transfers by 2030.
By 2035, instant payments are forecast to become the second most widely used non-cash payment method in the eurozone, behind cards, accounting for roughly 18% of all transactions.
This is not simply a story of faster payments.
It reflects a broader recalibration of Europe’s payments architecture, driven by regulation, investment asymmetries and shifting competitive dynamics between banks and non-bank institutions.
The 2027 mandate exposes a readiness gap
Under the EU’s Instant Payments Regulation, all banks, electronic money institutions (EMIs) and payment institutions (PIs) will be required to send and receive instant euro payments by July 2027, with charges aligned to those of traditional transfers.
While the rulebook is uniform, preparedness is not.
According to the research, all surveyed banks have already complied with previous SEPA Instant requirements, and more than half are already compliant with the 2027 mandates.
Nearly all expect to be ready on time.
By contrast, around one in five EMIs and PIs anticipate missing the deadline by three to six months.
This divergence reflects both legacy differences and strategic choices. For banks, instant payments are increasingly treated as core infrastructure.
For many non-banks, they remain a dependency, delivered through sponsor banks or correspondent arrangements that introduce complexity and delay.
Investment shapes innovation potential
The disparity is also financial. More than 60% of banks expect to spend over €20 million to achieve compliance, including a significant minority budgeting €50–100 million once capital and operating costs are included.
Most EMIs and PIs, by comparison, expect to spend less than €10 million.
That investment gap is already visible in product development.
Over three in five corporate banks are working with clients on new instant payment use cases, ranging from treasury optimisation to real-time liquidity management.
Among EMIs, fewer than a quarter report similar levels of collaboration.
As instant payments become the default rather than the exception, this difference risks hardening into a competitive divide between institutions that can innovate on top of real-time rails and those that merely access them.
Direct access reshapes competitive pressure
Regulatory change is also opening new doors.
Amendments to the Settlement Finality Directive will allow EMIs to become direct participants in SEPA clearing systems for the first time.
Four in ten EMIs say they intend to pursue direct access, with a small but growing number already connected.
For partner banks, this is a double-edged development. While direct access reduces dependency, it also raises expectations.
Up to 78% of EMIs and PIs say they would consider switching providers if their SEPA Instant service does not meet performance or reliability standards.
From instant payments to intelligent money movement
Celent’s modelling suggests that the long-term implications extend well beyond credit transfers.
As instant, account-to-account payments absorb volumes currently flowing through cards and direct debits, annual SEPA Instant transactions could exceed 90 billion by 2035.
This growth is likely to be reinforced by parallel trends, including agentic commerce, programmable payments and the gradual integration of stablecoins into regulated payment flows.
In that context, instant payments become less a product and more a foundation: the layer on which real-time, data-driven financial services are built.
The research concludes that compliance alone will not be enough.
Institutions that treat SEPA Instant as a platform for innovation—rather than a regulatory cost—are likely to define the next phase of Europe’s payments landscape.
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