- Antoine Bourgier
- Head of Payment & Cash Management Solutions, Societe Generale
Who Inspires and What Hinders?
The growing adoption of instant payments across Europe marks a significant shift, driven by SEPA harmonisation and the introduction of the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR). But for corporates, instant payments are not an end in themselves. Antoine Bourgier, Head of Payment & Cash Management Solutions, Societe Generale, reveals how this world is developing.
Instant payments are no longer a niche innovation in Europe’s payments landscape. Over the past two years, the uptake of SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) has accelerated significantly, rising from around 15% of total credit transfers in 2023[1] to more than 35% in Q1 2026[2]. This momentum reflects a broader shift: instant payments are steadily becoming part of the mainstream.
A key catalyst has been the introduction of the European Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) in 2025. By making instant payments mandatory for payment service providers offering SCT, the regulation aims to level the playing field, foster competition, and enhance pricing transparency. More fundamentally, it reflects Europe’s ambition to make instantaneity a standard feature of its domestic payments market.
Adoption is growing, but use cases remain selective
While uptake continues to increase year after year, instant payments are still primarily driven by consumer-oriented use cases. Person-to-person (P2P) and consumer-to-business (C2B) payments have been quick to adopt instant transfers, particularly for proximity payments or urgent situations. As a result, companies operating in C2B environments are naturally seeing a higher share of inbound instant payments.
Outbound instant payments from corporates, however, remain more measured. For many organisations, adopting instant payments is not simply a question of speed, but of transformation. It affects end to end processes, from commercial flows through to logistics, accounting, treasury, and risk management, and often requires significant changes to IT infrastructures.
Unsurprisingly, corporate adoption has therefore focused first on use cases where immediacy delivers tangible value. Customer refunds in retail or travel, for example, help reduce friction and enhance customer experience. Payouts such as wage advances or indemnities respond to growing expectations for flexibility. Insurance claims settlements benefit from faster disbursement and lower administrative costs.
In B2B relationships, just in time supplier payments can help optimise working capital, while liquidity sweeping enables funds to be concentrated or redistributed on demand, even outside traditional business hours. These use cases start to emerge, with more and more companies starting their journey into instantaneity, but still remain marginal to date.
That said, corporates do not necessarily seek ever shorter execution times for all payments. Current discussions around ‘non-time-critical’ payments – for example, payments via file uploads guaranteed to be delivered the same date, but without the 10-second constraint, thus limiting the risk of rejects – illustrate this well.
The priority is often less about absolute speed than about control, automation, and operational risk management. In that sense, making processes ‘instant compatible’ can be more important than executing every payment instantly.
From instant payments to real-time treasury
For corporates, instant payments become truly transformative only when they are combined with near real-time access to information. Real-time visibility on cash positions, payment statuses, and incoming flows fundamentally changes the way treasury can be managed.
This is driving a gradual shift towards a more event driven treasury model, where payments are closely linked to underlying business events such as delivery or invoice validation. In some cases, beneficiaries themselves can initiate structured payment requests, moving from a traditional ‘push’ logic towards more ‘pull based’ models that facilitate automation and reconciliation.
In this context, value increasingly lies in data orchestration and in how seamlessly payment information is integrated into internal systems. The rise of APIs illustrate this evolution particularly well, enabling companies to access precisely the information they need, when they need it, directly within their ERP or TMS.
Why 24/7 availability matters even more than speed
The shift towards instant payments inevitably raises broader questions around availability. For corporates, moving towards a fully real-time operating model represents a significant transformation. It requires investment in modernising IT chains, improving corporate to bank connectivity and ensuring access to high quality, structured data.
It also prompts reflection on the role of people in a 24/7 environment. While technology has largely removed technical cut offs, human cut offs remain. Will treasury teams need to operate around the clock in the future, or will new operating models emerge to reconcile real-time capabilities with human constraints?
This may end up creating distortions between regional and international groups. Ability to mobilise treasury teams around the clock may enable the latter to optimise their payments (e.g. later in the day) at the expense of the former. It could revolutionise the treasurer’s day as we know it. AI can surely help, but the need for control still prevents excluding the human in the loop.
From a banking infrastructure perspective, continuous availability can prove more demanding than instant execution itself. Payments may be available at all times, while certain settlement mechanisms – particularly for FX – still operate within defined windows. This tension is one of the key challenges of the shift to 24/7.
For banks, this evolution brings its own set of challenges, notably around intraday liquidity management, transaction monitoring, and real-time fraud prevention. Instantaneity requires greater agility, stronger controls, and highly resilient systems.
Europe’s domestic cross border advantage
One of Europe’s distinctive strengths lies in its ability to treat cross border payments as domestic. A SEPA instant payment operates within a harmonised framework, supported by common rules and infrastructures. For multinational corporates, this consistency offers a clear operational advantage.
Elsewhere, innovation can be equally dynamic, but payment ecosystems often remain fragmented. In regions such as the US or parts of Asia, multiple domestic rails and bilateral connections coexist. Europe’s choice of harmonisation has created a genuinely pan European payments market.
Cross border instant payments: the next step
Looking ahead, cross border instant payments represent the next frontier. They also concentrate many of the frictions absent from domestic contexts, from interoperability between fast payment systems to FX processing outside market hours.
At the same time, digital assets are gradually moving from theoretical debate to practical experimentation. While still at an early stage, emerging use cases all point in the same direction: faster, frictionless payments, available 24/7 throughout the year.
For corporates, these developments offer opportunities to reduce delays and costs, but they also raise important questions around compliance and operational security. For banks, they represent both a challenge and a chance to reassert their strengths, particularly in terms of security, robustness and regulatory expertise, as key differentiators in a rapidly evolving landscape.
