Demonstrating thought-leadership Instant Payments

During the TIPSapp Challenge, organized by the ECB in Frankfurt on 6 February 2018, equensWorldline demonstrated user-friendly instant payments solutions for P2P, P2B and B2B use cases.

To boost public awareness of instant payments across Europe, the ECB organized the TIPSapp Challenge event on 6 February 2018 in Frankfurt. The ECB hosted a “marketplace” where 16 invited participants presented their solutions and/or prototypes for apps that can be used to initiate and process instant payment transactions to a wide audience.

During this event equensWorldline, as frontrunner and facilitator of the entire payments value chain, presented four instant payment solutions that not only cover the more obvious P2P solutions, but also P2B and B2B use cases:

1. Mobile to Mobile via NFC
With this white label mobile app consumers can initiate Instant Payments with their mobile phones via Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

2. Mobile to Mobile via QR code
With this white label payment solution, the person who wants to receive money shows a QR code in the mobile app and the payer scans the code with his phone to initiate the payment. Fast and convenient.

3. Mobile to Point-of-Sale terminal via NFC
It is also possible to use the Point-of-Sale terminal for making Instant Payments with NFC. Consumers can tap their phone against the terminal to initiate an Instant Payment. The advantage of this white label solution is that the merchant receives his money instantly, via SCTinst which is faster, and that he can reuse the existing terminals without investing in new equipment. Besides Mobile to POS Instant Payments via NFC, equensWorldline can also facilitate tablet sales with Instant Payments via a QR code.

4. Business app for optimal international liquidity management
This white label business-to-business app which can be used on tablets is meant for business liquidity management. With this app, organizations can automate their cash optimization across various European bank accounts based on interest rates and upper or lower thresholds. It means that the money can easily be transferred instantly to countries with the best interest rates.

In parallel to the “marketplace” the program also included a series of presentations and panel discussions on instant payments from different angles: the user perspective, the payment service provider perspective as well as the infrastructure perspective. Michael Steinbach, CEO equensWorldline, participated in one of the panel discussions. The participants came to the agreement that interoperability was the key issue. A smartphone survey among the audience indicated that more than half of all guests (62%) thought that the uptake of instant payments will need up to five years. Also, a full European reach was seen as the number one key factor to make instant payment a success.

Mehdi Manaa from the ECB closed the event with the lines: “Today we did much more than predicting the future, we built it.”

Interested? Read more and download our presentation!

We invite you to read a short recap of what happened during the #TIPSapp Challenge event in our blog. You can also download the presentation of the four use cases that we demonstrated during the event.

Ready to support, whatever the market will decide
Ultimately, the market then will decide which Instant Payments solutions have the best potential and the biggest chance to succeed. Whatever the outcome will be, equensWorldline is ready to support the full value chain for Instant Payments, from payment initiation and channel solutions that directly benefit the end-customer, to back-office processing and clearing & settlement.