The National Bank Announces Instant Payments 24/7: Money in Seconds, but From When and at What Fee?

Money moving from one account to another in a few seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, meaning at night and on weekends too. That's what Vice-Governor of the National Bank Igor Velichkovski announced in a video address to the 8th International Conference of Regional Card Schemes and Financial Market and Retail Payment Infrastructures in Tirana.

After joining the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), the next step, according to Velichkovski, is a national instant payment system based on a clone of TIPS, the European platform for settling instant payments. SEPA sets the common rules for cross-border payments in euros, and the TIPS clone is meant to provide the technology for real-time settlement.

New services would come with it: paying with a mobile number or email address, payment requests, checking the payee before you send the money, and QR-code payments. Velichkovski says this will boost the use of digital payments among merchants and small companies and cut the use of cash.

The regional ambition is even bigger: linking the instant payment systems of the five Western Balkan economies and making them interoperable with the European payment infrastructure in the future. The end goal is a shift from standard to instant payments, in both denars and euros.

It sounds like real modernisation. But the announcement is missing the two things every user will ask first. The first is when, because no date was mentioned. The second is how much it will cost: will an instant transfer carry the same fee as today's, or will banks charge for it as a separate service? Speed is good news only if it doesn't arrive as a new line on your bank statement.