Intesa Sanpaolo, EBA Clearing Complete Pan-European Instant Payment Test
Italy’s largest retail bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and EBA Clearing have successfully completed their first user testing activities on financial technology provider Dovetail’s solution for EBA’s pan-European real-time payment platform, according to Paybefore sister publication Banking Technology.
Among the institutions funding the new EBA infrastructure, Intesa Sanpaolo is the first one to connect to the test system. The new infrastructure will provide a real-time payment processing engine “working around the clock on any day of the year,” according to an April 14 announcement. The end-to-end process between the originator and beneficiary accounts will “take no more than 10 seconds,” said Stefano Favale, head of global transaction banking, Intesa Sanpaolo.
EBA says starting in November 2017, account-servicing payment service providers from all over the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) will be able to use the solution for payment products in euros that are fully compliant with the European Payments Council’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme and in line with the ISO 20022 global messaging standards for real-time payments.
Intesa Sanpaolo is among 25 users currently preparing to go live this year and “together with those institutions that are planning to connect to the system in 2018, these early joiners represent nearly 85 percent of the SEPA Credit Transfer traffic processed by our STEP2 system today,” said Hays Littlejohn, EBA Clearing CEO.
Intesa Sanpaolo and Dovetail embarked on a major SEPA payments project in 2012. At the time, it was a rare instance of an Italian bank opting for anything other than an in-house or local solution. The first domestic project to go live took place in November of 2012 and, since then, Dovetail’s system has been rolled out across the international locations of the Intesa Sanpaolo group, replacing nearly 30 legacy payments applications. It covers high-value, low-volume and high-volume, low-value payments, and is supported by one centralized hub.
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