Instant Payments
- 02:53
Learn why instant payment transactions have become available to bank accounts worldwide
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Transcript
We'll just have a slight focus here on the instant payments world. This was very much brought in across the globe to assist in anti-money laundering. Most countries have now got their own method of instant payments here in the UK it's called Faster Payments. The scheme rules are that the payment shouldn't take any more than 20 minutes and more often not. It's instantaneous and the maximum amount of time it's allowed to take is two hours. All clearing banks and, and those banks offering money transfer services have to offer faster payments within the timescales I've just mentioned. Now the scheme rules are that per transaction, 250,000 Pounds. This is significantly increased when it started at 1,000 Pounds. I would say most banks here in the UK have a ceiling of 10,000 Pounds per account per day. And the reason it assists a lot with anti-money laundering is that if you go and buy a car now and you wanna pay 15,000 Pounds, the likelihood is they're not gonna accept cash, which used to be how a lot of these transactions were done. People don't accept checks anymore because it takes time for those to clear. So faster payments has become the method for these transactions to be done. This has permeated all the way down to maybe me repay one of my friends. I owe 5 Pounds to where it's a simple click on my phone now and an instant payment, a faster payment in the UK will be done and it will credit my friend Richard Botley with 5 Pounds. The volume of transactions has grown significantly. As you can see, over 1.7 billion transactions were posted in the UK through faster payments in 2017 with a value of in excess of 1.4 trillion Pounds. So the values and the volumes are huge, and this was starting from pretty much a a zero basis in about 2005. The faster payment system was very much driven by our need to make things happen instantaneously these days. It used a lot of the old backs infrastructure and in reality it takes away the safety net for the banks of whether a payment can be returned or not. What you do know with a fast payment is once the funds are in new your account, you have finality. The funds cannot be returned without your permission. Across the Euro zone separate instant credit transfer was launched in November, 2017, has a scheme limit of 15,000 euros and has proved very popular on the whole with retail transactions. I.e. private individuals making their payments to other private individuals. Scheme rules are that you cannot charge more for one of these transactions across the Euro zone than you would do if it was within your own country. So for things like Holiday lets, Airbnb, again paying relatives abroad, very cheap compared to what, what it used to be. In the USA, obviously just in US dollars because that's all everybody deals with in the USA and that you now have clearing house Real-time payment system scheme rules are $25,000 per transaction. Again, it's to make it that low value. Transactions now have an auditable line so the regulators can see where payments came from if needs be. And in Australia, another one has started the new payments platform. Just a year old. Don't have any numbers on that at this stage, but as you can see, this type of faster payment or instant payment is rolling across the globe very quickly.