“This is comparable to the shift from post to e-mail,” said European Commissioner for Financial Services Mairead McGuinness. Traditional transfers are handled during business hours and take at least one business day to complete. Instant payments, on the other hand, take place within ten seconds, at any time of the day or night. Although the technology for these payments has been available since 2017, they still accounted for only 11% of all intra-EU transfers at the beginning of this year.
