EBAday 2025: Why Banks Must Focus on Resiliency, Flexibility and Consolidation

Shifting geopolitical dynamics and the demands of the always-on digital economy have reshaped the European payments landscape – driving the need for instant, secure and accessible transactions across the bloc.  This transformation has been enabled by a wave of regulatory and technological initiatives that have imposed new requirements and overhauled the underlying infrastructure – dominating banks’ change agendas and budgets.

Yet as we approach EBADay 2025, the end is now in sight for many of these initiatives. The next phase of payments modernisation in Europe, therefore, stands to be defined by how banks can realise long-term business value and competitive differentiation. By responding to emerging short-term market requirements with a broader focus on increased resiliency, flexibility and consolidation, banks can ensure their payment processing systems are suitably robust, adaptable and efficient to support any payment, anytime, anywhere.

An instant age demands unprecedented levels of resiliency

The Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) introduced new requirements for SEPA Instant Credit Transfers (SCT Inst), demanding 24/7/365 availability for customers. This must be coupled with very limited downtime, applying to both unplanned downtime caused by failure and planned downtime due to system updates.

Banks must also be able to process incoming SCT Inst payments within seconds. Yet the reality is that instant payment volumes are inherently unpredictable, requiring that payment processing applications can handle unanticipated peaks without a delay in response times – or risk payments being timed-out by the central infrastructure.

Given the serious operational and reputational implications for banks unable to attain these required service levels, the payments systems used for processing SCT Inst payments must meet very high non-functional requirements in terms of scalability and availability. The problem is that many existing systems – whether from external vendors or built in-house – face an uphill battle to fulfil these stringent demands. Increasing instant payment volumes and stricter regulatory oversight will only compound the issue, requiring that banks work quickly to bolster their capability to meet these non-functional requirements.

Consolidating payment processing

This points to a broader challenge. Many banks still use several systems to process their payments – with individual flows for domestic, high-value, real-time, and international payments.

This is born out of necessity, as the infrastructures used to clear and settle different payment types vary greatly in terms of message formats and how these messages are processed. But with the migration of RTGS and international payment infrastructures to ISO 20022 (which is expected to be completed November 2025), most payment processing within Europe is now based on a single messaging standard. With this, a key reason for using different payment systems for different payments types is disappearing.

This presents a huge opportunity to consolidate all payments into a single system – unlocking myriad operational and commercial benefits. Banks can significantly reduce payment processing costs. The quality of service for customers is improved because there is a ‘single source of truth’ for all payments, irrespective of the type or the infrastructure via which they are cleared and settled. The implementation of new functionality is simplified and accelerated. Importantly, this not only includes features for customers, but also the adoption of new real-time and low-cost clearing and settlement options, such as OLO (one-leg-out) enabled instant payment infrastructures, digital currency  (DLT) networks as well as alternative providers like Banking Circle, ClearBank, Mastercard Move, Visa Direct or Wise.

Any payment. Anytime. Anywhere.

Ultimately, we can see that by focusing on increasing resiliency, flexibility and consolidation, banks can take meaningful steps towards a broader goal: supporting any payment, anytime, anywhere. Yet it is also apparent that complex and siloed payment estates stand in the way of this ambition.

The key question then becomes how can banks modernise their payments infrastructure safely and cost-effectively – while staying in control?

Please do not hesitate to visit the Icon team at EBAday – you’ll find us at stand 15 – to hear how leveraging a modern framework based payment solution can help banks to sustainably and progressively move towards a single payment processing infrastructure – enabling them to lead payments forward in Europe and beyond.

If you’d like to book a meeting during the event, please use the form below.