18 June 2025

EBAday 2025: shaping collaborative action

This year’s conference focused on a range of topics impacting the future of payments and transaction banking

 

In practice, this means industry-wide co-operation to address the most pressing challenges of the day – be it fighting instant payments fraud, complying with the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR), or implementing Verification of Payee (VOP) in a manner that avoids generating unwanted friction in bulk payments.

In this blog, we consider the key challenges raised by speakers at EBAday and how concerted market action is the best way to overcome them.

A coalition of the willing

In one EBAday session, regulators were dubbed the “gardeners of the financial ecosystem”. Regulation has regularly proved to be a catalyst; driving positive action and accelerating time to market. But it also introduces risks – particularly if imposed in ways that leave little to no room for sustainable commercial models. Compounding this problem is the fact that the cost of compliance isn’t always completely factored in. If the economic burden outweighs the benefits, regulation can stifle the very progress it hopes to accelerate.

There is a growing recognition within the payments community that meaningful progress often depends on a "coalition of the willing": a group of frontrunners prepared to invest early and encouraging the rest of the community, e.g. by taking the time for carving out pan-European specifications and practices as well as sharing first experiences with the wider ecosystem.

More can be done towards this goal. A top re-occurring theme at EBAday was the need for earlier and more concerted collaboration – not just between peers, but with regulatory authorities as well. Deepening engagement between key stakeholders is precisely the purpose of discussion and knowledge-sharing platforms like EBAday and educational initiatives such as the EBA Academy. The overarching objective is to promote broader awareness and market harmonisation, allowing all stakeholders to benefit from clear, targeted and practical regulations.

IPR compliance: a sprint now – a marathon later

The IPR mandates all Eurozone payment service providers (PSPs) to be capable of sending instant euro credit transfers from October 2025. As this milestone approaches, PSPs are under pressure to ensure they can deliver fast, reliable processing with round-the-clock availability.

Today it is time for testing – ensuring systems can cope with heightened transaction volumes – as well as preparing for any potential exceptions. Industry players should tread carefully here because there are some sizeable challenges on the road ahead. Fortunately, there was a sense at EBAday that ecosystem members are waking up to their duties.

The main area of concern is the mandatory introduction of VOP, particularly:

• how to keep the good friction, while avoiding the bad; and
• bulk payments – and the issues VOP entails for payment initiators (see VOP for bulks: Key challenges and pain points)

These challenges won’t be resolved if stakeholders stick to their lanes and attempt to devise solutions in siloes. Maintaining good friction and effectively handling bulk payments is a community-wide project.

Yes, a sprint is necessary now to meet the deadline, but going forward momentum must be harnessed to fine-tune solutions and roll out harmonised approaches, a task likely to take more than just a few months.

Building on existing foundations

Amid the ongoing debate on balancing the costs of regulation and innovation, a key takeaway from EBAday was the need to build on existing foundations in order to deliver greater value for customers.

Here are three examples of existing building blocks that can be leveraged to create value:

1. Request to pay

Thanks to regulation, instant payments are becoming increasingly ubiquitous; thereby paving the way for instruments that generate added value, such as request to pay – a key tool when it comes to digitalising payment and reconciliation processes. This is supported by the SEPA Request-to-Pay (SRTP) Scheme from the European Payments Council (EPC), which covers the set of operating rules and technical elements that allow a payee to request the initiation of a payment from a payer in a wide range of physical or online use cases. Infrastructure services compliant with the SEPA-wide scheme – such as the one offered by EBA CLEARING (R2P) – are already operational and available for participants. The key benefits of request to pay include:

• Enablers of innovation – acting as an authorisation layer over existing infrastructure. Request to pay supports the creation of new, user-friendly solutions, unlocking the full potential of instant payments in Europe.
• Aligned with EU strategic goals – request to pay supports the EU’s call for sovereign, interoperable solutions built on European infrastructure and expertise.
• Value to business-to-business (B2B) use cases – a successful pan-European proof of concept (PoC) with eight industry players demonstrated clear efficiency gains in B2B invoicing. This is just one of many potential applications.
• Supportive of the four-corner model – the principle upon which all European payment schemes are based. It facilitates competition, innovation and enhanced security, while also enabling collaboration around existing building blocks and payment infrastructures.

2. The OCT Inst Scheme 

The EPC’s One-Leg Out (OLO) Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) Scheme supports real-time cross-border payments – offering strong potential in helping the industry meet the G20 Roadmap targets for cross-border payments. Services are now available – including EBA CLEARING’s RT1 OCT Inst Service – and ready to be used, so market players can start making a difference for their customers.

PSPs around Europe have been implementing the SCT Inst Scheme over the past couple of years, and the cost of implementing the OCT Inst Scheme on top of this is marginal – yet the impact is significant; in particular, it enables faster and more transparent cross-border payments. In a call to action from the EBA’s Expert Group on Cross-Border Payments (EGXP) – Implementing OCT Inst: Why to start planning now and how to go about it –  PSPs are advised to begin resource planning now with a goal of starting implementation in 2026.

3. ISO 20022

Another means to deliver on the G20’s goals for cross-border payments is by investing in ISO 20022, the common global messaging standard. By enabling payments to carry richer and more structured data, ISO 20022 has the potential to streamline business-related processes, while also creating opportunities to develop new products and services that enhance customer satisfaction.

Many of the conversations around ISO 20022 for the past five years have focused on meeting implementation deadlines and getting over the line – with the promised long-term benefits far on the horizon. Now attention is turning to unlocking the full value of this industry-wide investment – a goal that can only be achieved if the industry moves beyond compliance and embraces more strategic, value-led implementation based on agreed market practices.

Collaboration beats competition

As outlined in Thomas Egner’s recent blog, “Happy Birthday, EBA!”, delegates at this year’s EBAday represented a raft of different organisations – many of which would technically be classified as competitors. And yet, there they were, standing shoulder to shoulder, networking – recognising that everyone stands to benefit from cross-market collaboration.

Such cooperation not only helps address shared challenges, but also drives greater harmonisation, fostering a more integrated and sovereign European payments ecosystem that benefits the broader European economy. In a multi-PSP, multinational landscape, this level of harmonisation is critical and delivers real advantages for end users.

In no other area is the importance of collaboration more apparent than the fight against financial crime. Fraud, for its part, is a systemic risk to the industry, and fighting against fraud should therefore never be seen as a competitive issue. Rather, it must be tackled in a collective manner – drawing together the unique skillsets of banks, industry, and the authorities.

Dominating discussions in this area at EBAday were fraud rates within instant payments, which are significantly higher than in traditional transfers – and growing rapidly year-on-year.  The inherent speed and irrevocability of instant payments – features that bad actors are using to their advantage – heightens the need for the industry to collectively strengthen payment network security.

Achieving this demands that two broad steps are taken:

• Leverage available tools – defences should be supplemented with indicators and real-time risk assessment tools. For example, by leveraging the network-wide view of STEP2 and RT1, EBA CLEARING’s Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection (FPAD) functionality provides PSPs with additional indicators beyond their own individual view; and
• Use the same language – the EBA Fraud Taxonomy, for instance, offers a straightforward framework to capture and categorise fraud scenarios. It provides a standardised mechanism to identify how the fraudster first contacted the victim, what trick the fraudster used to get hold of the victim’s money or credentials, and who initiated the payment transaction affected by the fraud.

On a more fundamental level, the industry must enable real-time data sharing to stay ahead of fraudsters. This means deeper co-operation between financial institutions, regulators, and law enforcement. Such efforts must be underpinned by data protection measures, as well as regulatory support via the likes of the upcoming Payment Services Regulation (PSR) and the third Payment Services Directive (PSD3).

Next stop Copenhagen

EBAday is heading to Copenhagen next year, with EBAday 2026 set for 16 to 17 June. The home of The Little Mermaid offers a fitting backdrop as the industry dives deeper into transformation – shifting further from discussion to action, unlocking greater value from existing investments and joining forces for collaborative initiatives that benefit the European ecosystem and its users.