- Wim Grosemans
- Global Head of Product Management, Payments & Receivables, Cash Management, BNP Paribas
Europe’s Instant Future
Europe’s Instant Payments Regulation is speeding towards implementation, forcing a rethink of corporate cash management and cross-border practices. With ISO 20022 enabling richer data and AI sharpening fraud detection, treasurers need to turn the race for real-time into a strategic gain.
Wim Grosemans, Global Head of Product Management, Payments & Receivables, Cash Management, BNP Paribas, recalls the moment Belgium’s new verification of payee (VoP) tool first gave him a green tick of approval, somewhat surprisingly. He was paying his sister, who is only listed in his phone under her first name. While a first name alone would not match a beneficiary according to the rule book, banks have worked out ways to enrich nicknames in payment apps with correct first and last names. “I thought it would flag an error, but it sailed through, and that felt like real progress,” he says.
That kind of seamless confirmation may seem trivial, but it reveals a great deal about where European finance is headed. What once relied on trust or manual checks is now being embedded in the system itself. And in 2025, the real driver of that change is regulation, and more specifically, the roll-out of the European Union’s Instant Payment Regulation. Grosemans describes this development as both a “good and bad” reality for the industry.
For banks and corporates, that dual reality is already being felt. Regulatory mandates accelerate innovation, prompting banks to build infrastructure that might have taken years to develop otherwise. The cost is capacity: the regulatory workload leaves less room for discretionary, market-led initiatives. “The books of work of the banks and the providers are, in the majority, driven by regulation,” says Grosemans. “That’s a normal counterpart; more regulation means less capacity for purely competitive innovation.”
By January 2025, mandatory reachability for all eurozone payment service providers (PSPs) and price equalisation between standard SEPA Credit Transfers and SEPA Instant were already in place. Grosemans notes that European Payments Council data in October shows eurozone coverage is now above 91% of PSPs, and even higher when measured by transaction volumes.
The October crunch
The real operational test came in October 2025. Typically, European payments teams prepare for their most significant updates in November, when Swift and other rulebook changes take effect. This year, the instant payment changes were scheduled to go live a month earlier, meaning banks had to manage two peaks in quick succession.
“It’s more difficult than people outside IT might think,” Grosemans notes. “You’re running all the SEPA changes, including SCTInst, in October and then the rest of the annual updates in November. That’s a lot for the same people, the same systems, in a compressed period.”
For treasurers, the timing may seem like a technical footnote. For banks delivering these capabilities, it serves as a reminder that even regulatory ‘go-live’ dates have ripple effects on resource allocation and project planning.
VoP: promise and limits
October’s changes began with VoP, designed to reduce misdirection and fraud by verifying the name against the account details. Grosemans’ own experience of paying his sister with nothing more than her first name stored in his phone captures the promise of the system: it cross-checks beneficiary details and either clears the payment or issues a warning before money leaves the account.
The stakes are even higher for corporates than for consumers. “The percentage of fraudulent payments is still relatively small, but when they happen, the losses can be huge,” says Grosemans. In markets such as the Netherlands and the UK, VoP has already proven its value. However, other jurisdictions were still playing catch-up ahead of the deadline.
Still, VoP introduces new considerations. For individuals, warning messages could discourage legitimate payments. For corporates, the ability to opt out is valuable, especially for those with robust fraud controls in place. But there is also the opposite risk: customers may be deterred from paying a corporate if a warning appears. This is particularly acute in onboarding scenarios, such as large corporates running collection-on-behalf-of (COBO) structures or invoicing new clients. Grosemans notes: “Onboarding is the moment when questions are most likely to arise. If the payment stalls at that stage, your DSO can suddenly go up.”
Banks are already preparing for the shift. “We’re testing tools such as alias management and refining onboarding flows to avoid unnecessary friction,” Grosemans affirms. “The aim is to make this a soft landing for corporates, not a disruption.”
Lifting the €100k cap: opportunity with caution
The removal of the €100,000 limit for instant payments was another change ushered in this October. Removing the cap opens the door to new treasury use cases, at least in theory. In practice, most corporates are unlikely to start sending high-value payments at all hours immediately. Liquidity, funding, and risk considerations are significant.
Even with the cap gone, instant payments will not transform the underlying structure of money markets. While the situation is evolving, central banks and bank treasury teams still operate within business hours. Outside those hours, instant payments depend on pre-positioned “bank-trapped liquidity” – funds set aside to settle payments without access to fresh funding. That carries an opportunity cost and increases risk if market conditions change.
The decision to lift the €100,000 cap inevitably raises questions about systemic risk. In the event of stress at a financial institution, the ability to move unlimited amounts in seconds could, in theory, amplify liquidity outflows.
“But it’s not a free-for-all,” Grosemans stresses. “The same fraud checks and prudential filters remain in place. The only difference is that now the system can process higher values without an artificial cap on the clearing level.”
That reassurance is important because the change is not only about consumer confidence but also about how banks and PSPs handle liquidity in practice. PSPs moving funds at higher thresholds face new intraday management considerations, particularly around liquidity buffers and settlement timing.
Catching up to instant
For most European corporates, adoption will be measured in years rather than months. SEPA Instant is not about to displace SEPA Classic overnight, especially for bulk payment runs. These are tightly structured processes, governed by multiple sign-offs, where predictability takes precedence over speed.
“Most SEPA flows come out of disciplined payment runs with a four-eyes, sometimes six-eyes, principle,” Grosemans says. “Those processes prize predictability over raw speed, so while adoption will move, it will not happen all at once.”
Current use cases are primarily concentrated in niche scenarios, such as insurance claims, select salary payments, and API-driven disbursements. The fact that a handful of institutions remain outside instant reach provides another reason for caution.
Even so, substitution effects are likely. As banks default to instant payments for consumer transactions, volumes will drift away from SEPA Classic. For corporates, the shift will be slower but not static.
The impact extends well beyond the eurozone. Faster adoption within SEPA is already shaping developments in the Nordics and Eastern Europe, where real-time capability is as much about competitive positioning and user expectations as it is about compliance. For firms that trade heavily with the EU, aligning settlement speeds reduces friction in reconciliation and cash management.
Cross-border links are also moving from concept to practice. BNP Paribas, for example, will send a direct payment message to a foreign correspondent bank that can then clear it into the instant schemes of a handful of currencies. This capability is likely to grow in importance as counterparties expect near-real-time experiences across corridors. In practice, that means fewer cut-off headaches, clearer signals on funds availability, and faster resolution when a transaction stalls.
Speaking the same language with ISO 20022
Alongside instant payments, another major structural shift is looming: the ISO 20022 migration for corporates. Here too, regulatory deadlines are the catalyst. By November 2026, corporates must be able to provide structured address information; further requirements, such as the use of legal entity identifiers (LEIs), are likely to be implemented after 2027.
For many, the instinct is to do the minimum required, but Grosemans warns against this. “If you try to go for the minimalistic solution, you will not die in November 2026, but you will start piling up the technical debt that at some point will be just increasing exponentially.”
The strategic upside is often overlooked. Richer payment data enables better master data management, more efficient settlement routing, and potentially lower cross-border costs, for example, by identifying transactions that could use ACH rails instead of traditional cross-border payments. It also lays the groundwork for advanced automation and AI.
Corporate-to-bank connectivity is another consideration. Many multinationals standardised on ISO formats for SEPA implementation, but still use local formats, such as CFONB 320 in France or DTAZV in Germany, for domestic payments. “These legacy standards are unlikely to survive, with some disappearing as early as next year,” Grosemans says.
Digital currencies and AI: exploring new frontiers
If regulation is one driver of change, market curiosity is another, particularly in tokenised deposits, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins. Corporate interest is rising, boosted by recent US legislative moves. Yet Grosemans stresses that these innovations will complement, not replace, existing instruments. “It’s not because we see all this going on that we can just write it off and move everything to stablecoin,” he says.
The practical test is to identify the problems that digital currencies can solve that today’s tools cannot. “Even with instant payments, you cannot guarantee that once the money is debited, it’s irrevocably credited,” Grosemans explains. “Atomic settlement makes that possible.”
Around-the-clock availability across time zones, as well as the ability to integrate asset and payment settlement on a single infrastructure, also stand out. These features could ease money market investments and reduce friction in securities and FX, but only if fragmentation is avoided. A patchwork of privately issued euro tokens and the fragmentation of payment networks, Grosemans warns, is the outcome banks and regulators most want to prevent.
AI, meanwhile, is already embedded in day-to-day controls. Grosemans points to an AI platform that flags suspicious client instructions before execution and asks the user to confirm intent. “AI is valuable when it reduces false comfort,” he says. “If a system challenges you at the moment of risk, that’s better than letting a suspicious payment through because the process felt smooth.” It’s a narrow use case with real impact: prompts at the moment of risk that curb complacency without blocking legitimate activity.
Beyond this, banks are testing tools designed to enhance operational quality, accelerate resolution times, and provide guidance when treasurers face complex payment or receivables questions.
Data quality is the gating factor. The richer and more structured the data, the more useful the AI. This is where ISO 20022 matters again, not as a box-ticking exercise but as the foundation for trustworthy inputs. “If you want to make payments smart and use AI, you need to feed it with meaningful and trustworthy data,” Grosemans says. His broader message is consistent: start with the problem you are trying to solve, then decide where AI genuinely helps.
Strategic priorities for treasurers
The conversation around instant payments, ISO 20022, digital currencies and AI ultimately comes back to a single point: priorities. For treasurers, the challenge is not the abundance of change, but rather deciding which developments warrant immediate action and which can be observed from the sidelines.
“Try to make [investments] that are future-proof,” Grosemans says. “Balance the mandatory with the strategic, and focus on solving the problems that matter most to your business.”
Success won’t come from pristine systems or chasing every new tool. It rests on readiness to act and the judgement to focus on changes that count. “A lot is coming at us, but not everything will be relevant for you and your treasury,” Grosemans concludes. “Focus on what will be.”
