REX: More than 25M Instant Credit Transfers Processed by Iberpay
FACTS
- The Spanish clearing house Iberpay reports 25 million instant credit transfer operations processed, highlighting significant progress in Spain.
- How it works: The real-time Euro payment service launched by Iberpay allows its users to carry out instant transactions across Europe, based on the EBA Clearing’s RT1 and the BCE’s TIPS.
- Since launch in November 2017, Iberpay processed more than 25 million instant credit transfers, which combined are worth over €18,000M. On a daily basis, this system currently processes roughly 135,000 payments worth more than €100 million. These transactions require 2 seconds on average.
- Partners: 90 Spanish banks (90% of their home market) are participating in this system:
- Bankia, one of their main partner banks, accounts for 39% of the overall transferred amount and 28% of all processed transactions. They indeed carried out 6.6 million instant credit transfers which, combined, are worth roughly €6,500 million between February and December 2018.
CHALLENGES
- This Spanish payment system managed by Iberpay is one of the most advanced in Europe. Yet, despite this revolution, its weight compared to the overall number of exchanges remains limited: 25 million instant credit transfers compared to 578 million regular transfers in 2018.
- Among outstanding challenges preventing them for reaching mass usage, these services need to make adaptations to their business models. Many Spanish banks (BBVA, Abanca, CaixaBank, etc.) charge these instant transactions while standard transfers can be completed for free. The limit applied on these payments can also be deterring. Sabadell, for instance, just announced they intended to charge €0.95 per transaction.
- The other EU countries, including France, witnessing similar rollouts will have to face the same challenges. While most French banks are considering optional, paid instant transfer services, Boursorama Banque introduced a free instant credit transfer service for all.
About BIZUM
- Bizum is a Spanish mobile-based micro-payment service relying on instant credit transfers
- 2M users
- 10.5M transactions, €600M
- Average amount per transfer: €55
- Most active customers: 35 to 44
MARKET PERSPECTIVE
- Spanish financial institutions have increasingly been joining forces over the past years despite growing competitive pressure. They would even be looking into unifying payment processors: Redsys, Cecabank and Iberpay.
- Iberpay is one of the leading European players on the instant credit transfer market. In Italy, their local counterpart Jiffy claimed nearly 4.2M users last year, while the Swedish Swish claims more than 5 million users.