Instant Payments at the Point of Sale: What the Real-Time Rule Means for Merchants

The short answer

An instant payment is not a new card brand but a rail of its own: a SEPA credit transfer in which the money reaches your account within ten seconds — around the clock, including Saturdays. What matters for you as a merchant is not the technology but the credit: card payments usually land in the account one to two banking days later, an instant credit transfer immediately.

None of this is compulsory for you. The new regulation obliges the banks, not the till — but it makes the instant credit transfer the normal case, and that is precisely why it pays to know where it shows up at your point of sale.

What “instant” really means at the POS — and what it does not

An instant credit transfer (SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, or SCT Inst for short) is a transfer from account to account that, under the European Payments Council rulebook, must be credited within ten seconds, seven days a week. No card number, no interchange fee, no acquirer in between — the money goes straight from the customer’s account to yours.

From this follows the most common misconception: an instant payment does not replace your terminal and is not another card in the co-badge. It is a second way to pay that sits alongside the card. At the physical counter it needs a trigger — today usually a QR code or the Wero wallet, through which the customer authorises the payment in their banking app. The card does not disappear because of it; the question is whether you place a faster, card-free alternative next to it.

What the Instant Payments Regulation means for merchants

Regulation (EU) 2024/886 — the Instant Payments Regulation — entered into force on 8 April 2024 and sets payment service providers in the euro area a fixed timetable. Three points of it reach all the way to your till:

What	For whom	Since when (euro area)
Being able to receive instant credit transfers	all banks/payment service providers	9 January 2025
Being able to send instant credit transfers	all banks/payment service providers	9 October 2025
Charge parity: instant may not cost more than a normal SEPA credit transfer	for the payer	9 October 2025
Verification of Payee: free check of name ↔ IBAN before sending	for the payer	9 October 2025

In practice this means two things for you. First: almost every one of your customers has been able to receive an instant credit transfer since the start of 2025 and to send one since October 2025 — the reach is there, the payment method is no longer a niche. Second: the Verification of Payee matches your stored name against the IBAN before every payment. If the name does not match exactly (trading name instead of owner’s name, a typo, outdated data), the customer gets a warning and hesitates. Clean, up-to-date account master data is therefore not red tape but a question for the till.

Where instant payments show up at your till

Three routes are realistic, and they differ sharply in effort:

• Wero and other wallets: the European Payments Initiative is extending Wero step by step from person-to-person payment and the online checkout towards the shop floor. Underneath it lies an instant credit transfer. This is the route that looks most like a normal card payment — the customer holds up the phone, you receive a confirmation.
• QR code / request-to-pay: you show a payment code, the customer releases the amount in their banking app. Cheap to set up, but slower at the till and dependent on the customer having the app to hand.
• Online and omnichannel: in the shop the account-to-account payment is furthest along; how it sits alongside card, PayPal and buy-on-invoice is set out in my overview of the ways to integrate online payment.

Which of these is worth it for your business is a question of product and conditions — that belongs to my company, not in an advice piece.

What it costs — and what we do not yet know

Here honesty matters more than a tidy table. The regulation governs the payer: their bank may not charge more for an instant credit transfer than for a normal SEPA credit transfer. For you as the payee it does not govern the acceptance price — and a public standard rate like the card merchant discount rate simply does not yet exist for account-to-account acceptance at the POS.

What can be said: an instant credit transfer has no percentage interchange fee and no card scheme fees. Its cost logic is a different one from the card — which makes the card prices the benchmark that any POS instant offer has to beat. For a sense of how expensive the card rail is by card type: girocard, debit and credit card compared and the eight cost components of a terminal contract.

Worked example: the liquidity advantage, not the discount

Today the measurable advantage lies not in the percentage rate but in the timing of the credit. A trades business with 20 invoices of 450 euros a month takes 9,000 euros in card turnover. The credit for the card payments arrives bundled and with a value date usually one to two banking days later — if the turnover falls on a Friday, the money waits over the weekend for up to four calendar days.

Payment route	When the money is there
girocard / credit card	credit bundled, value date usually 1–2 banking days later
normal SEPA credit transfer	1 banking day
SEPA instant credit transfer	≤ 10 seconds, including at night and at the weekend

With a two-day value date, around two days’ worth of turnover is permanently “in transit” — money you cannot draw on although the customer paid long ago. For a business that pre-finances materials or calculates tightly, that is the real lever: each individual 450-euro amount is in the account within ten seconds, even at eleven o’clock on a Saturday. This is a model calculation with disclosed assumptions (third-party card conditions, typical value dates), not an offer — the exact value date is in your acceptance contract.

What to do now

1. Check when your card payments are credited today. The value date is in your statement — it is the baseline from which the liquidity advantage of a real-time method can be worked out at all.
2. Reconcile your account master data. Name and IBAN must match exactly, otherwise the Verification of Payee warns your customers as they pay. Since October 2025 this applies to every transfer to you.
3. Decide whether a card-free alternative fits your business — high basket sizes, a lot of regular customers and a tight margin argue for it; fast walk-in trade at the counter rather against it.
4. Do not judge an instant offer on the percentage rate alone. Factor in the timing advantage of the credit and the absence of scheme fees, not just the merchant discount rate.
5. Think of the payment method alongside the card, not instead of it. Wero and the like are at the start of their in-store rollout; for now the card remains your backbone.