Europe has always been far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to instant payments. This week, they are taking another step forward.
Swift announced today that the European Payment Council’s awkwardly named One-Leg-Out Instant Credit Transfer scheme (OCT Inst) went live this week and it enables payments to and from Europe to be processed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
This launch follows a successful proof of concept earlier this year with Iberpay, the European Payments System and large banks from Spain, Australia, Brazil and the UK.
Swift is making progress on bringing faster payments to the world as they have previously announced that 89% of the payments on its network reached their destination within an hour. With the launch of OCT Inst that number is bound to increase.
While the U.S. has only recently launched FedNow and it does not connect to the outside world yet, global instant payments is slowly becoming a reality. The U.S. will catch up eventually.
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Swift connects instant payment systems to bring 24/7 processing across borders
Swift has connected domestic payment schemes across Europe to provide full transparency and end-to-end tracking for instant cross-border transfers destined for the EU.
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