Nordics Remain Real-Time Payments Frontrunners

Home to some of the most developed and widespread real-time payments schemes, Europe is leading the charge in driving consumer and merchant adoption across the world.

Several systems facilitate these payments across the continent, including the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Instant Credit Transfer scheme, also known as SEPA Instant, which was launched in 2017 to enable ultra-fast euro payments across the 36 countries within the SEPA region.

Some countries have also developed domestic payment systems to complement the existing pan-European scheme. These include the Faster Payments Service in the U.K., Finland’s Siirto system and Sweden’s Swish system.

Lena Hackelöer, CEO at Stockholm-based instant payments provider Brite Payments, discussed this regional trend in an interview with PYMNTS, noting how Europe has stayed ahead of the curve following significant progress made in the real-time payment space.

“If you take the world map and map out where schemes for instant processing of bank transactions are already launched, [about] to launch and are getting better and better — [it’s in Europe],” Hackelöer told PYMNTS.

The Nordic region, where Hackelöer’s business is based, for example, has been a global digital payments frontrunner for decades and holds promise for the growth of real-time payments across the wider EU region.

This can be seen in the March edition of the “Real-Time Payments World Map,” a PYMNTS collaboration with The Clearing House which explores real-time payments across Europe. In the report, Denmark and Finland are two of the five European countries singled out — others are Germany, France and Czech Republic — with the potential for increased real-time payments adoption on the continent.

And according to the report, Denmark’s journey toward a cashless society is moving faster than the rest of the world, in line with a trend seen across other Scandinavian countries.

In fact, daily real-time payments volume in the country, which jumped significantly at the onset of the pandemic, is expected to increase from the 433 million daily average recorded in 2021 to hit 833 million by 2026, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15%.

But despite Denmark’s strong position on the instant payments landscape, Danish banks and payment service providers (PSP) represent a meager 4% of the 2,313 currently offering SEPA Instant.

Representation of Finnish banks is even less significant, with only 10 banks and PSPs offering the SEPA Instant Payment scheme as of February this year, according to recent data from the European Payments Council (EPC), compared to over 1,300 in Germany, 433 in Austria and 300-plus in France.

However, Finns’ access to the Siirto real-time digital payment scheme, launched by three of the country’s leading financial institutions — OP Bank, Nordea and Danske Bank — is bound to make a difference in driving the growth of instant payments in the country in the years to come.

In fact, PYMNTS projects that Finland’s real-time payments volume will grow at a CAGR rate of nearly 50% over the next five years, jumping from an average daily volume of 119 million in 2021 to 832 million by 2026.

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