I've only just heard of this, but it looks like it's an attempt by lots of big European banks to beat Mastercard & Visa at their own game!
It says they're building on EU Instant Payments, which has been standard for a while, and for supported banks (a good percentage now, and presumably all 30 banks listed here) means bank-to-bank euro transfers are free & take less than 10 seconds, 24/7. See https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa....
Sounds like they're planning to produce card infrastructure on top of that, so with an EPI-supporting merchant and an EPI consumer card, a card transaction is implemented directly as an instant bank transfer, with no traditional credit card companies involved.
Oh and they're proposing to support p2p in the same way too. I guess that's more like competing with Revolut et al, since you can't really sign up to process Visa/Mastercard as an individual today anyway.
Does anybody know any more background on this? I have no idea about the seriousness of the proposal or anything at all, but it sounds like a big deal if they can pull that off.
It says they're building on EU Instant Payments, which has been standard for a while, and for supported banks (a good percentage now, and presumably all 30 banks listed here) means bank-to-bank euro transfers are free & take less than 10 seconds, 24/7. See https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa....
Sounds like they're planning to produce card infrastructure on top of that, so with an EPI-supporting merchant and an EPI consumer card, a card transaction is implemented directly as an instant bank transfer, with no traditional credit card companies involved.
Oh and they're proposing to support p2p in the same way too. I guess that's more like competing with Revolut et al, since you can't really sign up to process Visa/Mastercard as an individual today anyway.
Does anybody know any more background on this? I have no idea about the seriousness of the proposal or anything at all, but it sounds like a big deal if they can pull that off.