Send & Receive Payments in the Eurozone via Open Banking with Echo Money

Increasingly, in seconds. Since the EU's Instant Payments Regulation took effect, all euro-area banks have been required, as of October 2025, to support SEPA Instant transfers, which settle in under ten seconds around the clock, including weekends and holidays. Because most Open Banking payments in the Eurozone run as SEPA transfers, a Payment Initiation Service Provider can trigger a payment that clears about as fast as a card authorization, without the multi-day delay that used to apply to standard bank transfers. Before this regulation, settlement speed varied more by bank and country, with some transfers still taking a day or two rather than seconds. Businesses today can generally expect near-instant confirmation for most transactions, though a few banks may still fall back to slower processing on certain accounts.

The legal framework is set at EU level through PSD2, and soon PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation, but supervision happens nationally, so there's some variation in practice, especially around technical implementation. Each Eurozone country designates its own national authority, such as the central bank, to license and supervise banks and Payment Initiation Service Providers in that market, coordinating through the European Banking Authority to keep standards aligned. In practice, core rights, like a customer's ability to authorize a payment with strong authentication, stay consistent everywhere, but enforcement pace and API reliability can differ noticeably between, say, Germany and a smaller member state. Businesses operating across multiple Eurozone markets should expect some country-by-country variation in reliability even though the legal foundation is shared.

The most common reason is cost. Open Banking payments move directly from the customer's bank account to the business, typically bypassing card network interchange fees and the intermediaries a card transaction usually passes through, which can meaningfully lower cost per transaction, especially on higher-value purchases. It also tends to reduce certain fraud and chargeback risk, since the customer authorizes the payment inside their own bank's secure environment with strong authentication, rather than entering card details on a third-party page. For higher-ticket items, like travel bookings or B2B invoices, Open Banking can raise successful payment rates compared to cards, since it doesn't rely on card limits or cross-border authentication failures. The trade-off is lower consumer familiarity than cards in some markets, so businesses often offer it alongside cards rather than as a full replacement.

Yes. Echo Money supports Open Banking as a local payment method across Eurozone markets, letting businesses accept direct bank payments without building their own connections to individual banks' APIs or securing a Payment Initiation Service Provider license themselves. Because implementation still varies somewhat by country, this is useful for businesses operating across several Eurozone markets at once, since Echo Money manages the underlying compliance and bank connectivity behind a single integration rather than separate work per country. Customers pay by authorizing the transaction inside their own banking app, funds typically settle through SEPA Instant within seconds, and Echo Money handles confirmation and reconciliation automatically. Collected funds can then be settled in euros, other major currencies, or stablecoins, depending on how the business wants to move money.