Europe to facilitate instant payments without additional fees

Brussels has just given the green light and it will be possible, from 2025, to pay instantly, via your bank, in all euro zone countries, without additional costs.

This is a new regulation which was adopted on Monday February 26 at political level and which will come into force no later than autumn 2025. The Council of the European Union, which brings together the 27 Member States, approved a project which was validated at the beginning of February by Parliament. The text will force banks to offer their customers, individuals and businesses, a transfer service in less than ten seconds between different European countries, for transactions only in euros.

This instant payment service will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and all year round without exception of dates, holidays, public holidays, etc. The icing on the cake: if there are fees, they should not be higher than those currently in force for traditional transfers.

A service today billed

In many countries, including France, traditional transfers – when you make a bank-to-bank transfer – require a delay of a day or two, and they are free. But in the case of an instant transfer, the service is generally charged and, in some cases, ultimately quite numerous, impossible for cross-border payments. All these obstacles will therefore be lifted to simplify the lives of individuals, but especially of businesses whose invoices will be honored more easily and within reasonable time.

Brussels pursues two objectives. First of all, helping European payment companies compete with American Visa and Mastercard. But also, without saying it, have a means of combating payment fraud, in particular the fraudulent use of checks. According to the Banque de France, all means of payment fraud in France increased by 17% in volume and more than 5% in value in the first half of 2023 alone, which represents between 600 million and one billion euros of damage.