SEPA SINGLE EURO PAYMENTS AREA

instaSEPA is not a company. instaSEPA is an open market-coordination initiative to promote the SRTP scheme and the NFC technical solution for IP@POI, under one public-domain brand: “instaSEPA accepted here”.

We invite all Credit Institutions and Payment Institutions to adopt these EPC open standards:

SRTP — SEPA Request-to-Pay EPC QR Code standard (for fallback)
Coordinated adoption of EPC SEPA Request-to-Pay and QR Codes in Europe - draft paper September 2026

Europe can run POS retail payments on SEPA

Every euro-area citizen already has the rails to pay directly from a bank account. The market still needs coordination to use these rails at the till and the checkout. This paper proposes that Europe coordinate its banks, payment institutions and fintechs around standards Europe has already published: EPC SEPA Request-to-Pay (and QR codes as fallback), settled by SEPA Instant Credit Transfer. Payments in European shops and on European websites can then run on SEPA instead of international card networks.

instaSEPA mark
The proposed mark: the SEPA identity with insta on top of it.

Proposal summary

Every citizen uses their own banking app in a shop: tap via NFC and pay in a matter of seconds, with the same user experience as card payments, while the funds originate from one SEPA IBAN and are credited to another SEPA IBAN maintained at a different bank.

The EU has mandated instant payments and published the standards to initiate them at the point of sale. The opportunity to execute easily the coordination between the two sides of the market: i) have all the banks & PIs support SEPA-NFC & QR-code, and ii) bring the physical-shop & ecommerce merchants on board too. We propose a measured pilot, built by the market.

No new scheme. No new clearing house. No proprietary network. Just adoption of standards that already exist.

Why now

Three things changed in the last two years:

  1. Instant settlement is now mandatory infrastructure. Under the Instant Payments Regulation, euro-area PSPs must receive SEPA Instant Credit Transfers and must offer Verification of Payee since 9 October 2025.
  2. The standards to trigger those payments at a till or checkout are published. The EPC SEPA Request-to-Pay scheme (and QR codes as fallback) for mobile-initiated SEPA (Instant) Credit Transfers are published and public.
  3. The window to lead is open, and it will not stay open long. Wero is live in Belgium, France and Germany, with point-of-sale NFC planned from H2 2026. The EuroPA alliance and EPI signed an MoU in February 2026 to build pan-European interoperability for about 130 million users. Europe can be first to ship an open, non-proprietary, standards-only implementation that other member states can replicate.

Built on published standards

An open payment experience built only on published European Payments Council work:

SCT Inst · settlement

The instant SEPA credit transfer. Funds move IBAN to IBAN in seconds, with a scheme maximum of 10 seconds. No card authorisation network.

EPC QR code · EPC069-12

Encodes beneficiary, IBAN and amount at the till or checkout. The customer's own bank app scans it and pre-fills the transfer.

SEPA Request-to-Pay · EPC014-20 v4.0

The target state for request messaging. The payee sends a structured request, and the payer approves it in their own bank app.

Verification of Payee · mandatory since Oct 2025

Confirms that the payee name matches the IBAN before the payer approves. This check is the primary fraud control.

Proximity · NFC tap

The buyer's banking app emits a unique IBAN over NFC at the till, through host-card emulation. The QR code is the fallback.

Virtual IBANs · acquiring side

Merchant collection IBANs with a virtual-IBAN layer, in house or via a PSP, for per-terminal and per-checkout reconciliation.

The design does not require a new scheme rulebook, a new clearing house, a proprietary wallet, exclusive rights for any single fintech, or coordinated pricing.

Who gains what

Citizens

Pay from their own bank account, in the banking app they already have. No new wallet, no card number, no foreign network in the critical path. Approval uses their bank's own strong customer authentication, and the payee is verified before they approve.

Merchants

Instant, final settlement to a SEPA IBAN. There is no batch clearing. One acceptance brand (instaSEPA or just SEPA) across physical retail and ecommerce.

Banks and PSPs

The customer relationship and SCA stay in the IBAN issuer's own app. Each acquirer and PSP sets its own pricing. A new opportunity to monetise SEPA transactions at scale: a revenue-share scheme (SEPA Interchange), where the acquirer of the SEPA transaction shares the revenue with the payer's IBAN issuer.

Europe

European PSPs and banks can have now the 4th silver bullet instead of just 3: digital Euro, Euro stablecoins, Wero. instaSEPA (via SRTP) is the 4th silver bullet that allows the open market to adopt the solutions that have the best User Experience for them.

How the funds flow

The customer pays only the shop price. The merchant receives an instant credit to a SEPA IBAN. The diagram shows an illustrative commercial example.

Buyeraccount at the issuing bankAcquiring disposableunique vIBANacquiring bank or PSPMerchantshop or webshop€100.00SCT Inst, seconds€99.00instant creditpays €0.00 extra€1.00 fee1% of the payment€0.50issuing bank€0.50acquiring bankSecond example: €0.50 acquirer, €0.40 issuer, €0.10 PSP that connects the acquirer.

The fee level and the splits in the diagram are illustrative only. Each acquirer and PSP sets its own merchant pricing, bilaterally and competitively. There is no scheme-set interchange and no coordinated fee, and the working group would explicitly exclude pricing, to stay clear of European competition rules.

What happens on a tap for SEPA NFC pay

The diagram shows the target flow, with SEPA Request-to-Pay end to end.

Buyerbanking appShop tillPOSAcquirerbank or PSPIssuing bankholds the account① NFC tapthe phone sends a disposable unique vIBAN② amount + unique vIBAN③ Request-to-Pay (SRTP)addressed to unique disposable vIBAN④ finds the real IBAN accountbehind the disposable unique vIBAN⑤ payment request appears in the banking app⑥ buyer approveswith SCA⑦ SCT Inst transfer⑧ confirmation: paidFrom tap to confirmation: under 5 seconds in the demo.

The buyer holds the phone against the till. The banking app transmits a disposable unique vIBAN over NFC.

  1. The till sends a Request-to-Pay to that unique vIBAN. The request contains the amount and the merchant name.
  2. The issuing bank maps the unique vIBAN to the buyer's real IBAN account and shows the request in the banking app.
  3. The buyer approves with strong customer authentication (SCA).
  4. The issuing bank sends an SCT Inst transfer to the acquirer. The acquirer credits the merchant and confirms to the till.

One mark on every shop door

Customers must see one sign and know that they can pay, the same in-store and online. The instaSEPA mark is proposed as a shared acceptance brand, governed by the working group on open, non-discriminatory terms. It is available to every licensed player and controlled by no single company.

instaSEPA mark
Accepted here
Tap & Pay with your banking app.

Consumer protection, competition and integrity

A national payments capability must be safe, lawful and fair before it is fast.

  • Irrevocability and disputes. SEPA Instant payments are final; there is no chargeback. Protection therefore comes before authorisation: Verification of Payee confirms the payee first, and PSD2 liability and refund rules apply to unauthorised or incorrectly executed transactions. Merchant refunds run as ordinary credit transfers.
  • Competition law. The coordination asked is technical interoperability and standards adoption only, never price. There is no imposed interchange pricing and no coordinated fee split. We introduce a SEPA Interchange scheme as a structure and not at pricing level.
  • Data protection. The design applies GDPR data minimisation and purpose limitation. Strong customer authentication and credentials remain with the customer's own bank. No third party holds them.

What we propose to all European fintechs and banks: join this initiative and be part of the infrastructure of the most popular payment method that Europe can have: SEPA

No endorsement of any single vendor is implied or sought, and participation is open to every licensed player on equal, non-discriminatory terms.

A proposed path:

  1. Working group and term sheet. The market participates. Scope, governance and success metrics.
  2. Technical specification, industry-led: Verification of Payee, SCT Inst settlement, the SRTP migration path, EPC QR initiation, and the consumer-rights note.
  3. Issuer app support in the banks: QR scan, request receipt with SCA approval, and app-to-app return.
  4. Acquirer and PSP acceptance at till and checkout, settled to SEPA IBANs, with virtual-IBAN reconciliation for clean per-terminal reporting.
  5. A measured pilot in the sandbox with selected retail and ecommerce merchants, measured on time-to-pay, authorisation success, consumer experience, and merchant cost versus cards.
  6. Publish the playbook: an open reference implementation other member states can copy.

If only some banks join. A minimum viable coalition of two core domestic banks plus the PI and EMI community is enough for a meaningful pilot. Customers of non-adopting banks can still pay with a standard SEPA Instant transfer to the same merchant IBAN.

See it work today

Live checkout demo

A web checkout with a real EPC QR code simulation and a fake SRTP simulation using bunq NL IBANs for payers.

Open the demo

Android tap demo

An Android APK that helps simulate the SRTP POC. The supermarket can accept an IBAN via NFC to send the SRTP to.

Download the APK

NFC tap video

A short video shows a simulated SRTP POC where an NL buyer pays for bananas via NFC in a supermarket.

A working reference experience exists and can be demonstrated live. The proposal is that Europe owns the national rollout under open standards.

Closing

Cards solved the user experience. SEPA already solved the money movement.

SRTP — SEPA Request-to-Pay EPC SRTP scheme

SEPA Request-to-Pay is the EPC scheme that lets a payee send a structured payment request (pain.013) through the banking network straight to the payer's own app. The payer gets a notification, reviews the amount and the merchant's name, and approves with strong customer authentication — which triggers an instant SEPA credit transfer back to the payee.

It is the open, account-to-account answer to "tap to approve": request, notify, authenticate, settle — in seconds, at European scale. Adopted by all EEA banks, SRTP would give every merchant and subscription business a native, card-free way to collect payments with a user experience equal to the best card wallets.

Technical overview — the EPC scheme

Scheme rulebookEPC SEPA Request-to-Pay (SRTP) Scheme Rulebook
Message standardISO 20022
Request messagepain.013 — payment activation request (payee → payer)
Status messagepain.014 — accept / reject status report (payer → payee)
Model4-corner: payee ↔ payee's RTP provider ↔ payer's RTP provider ↔ payer
TransportAPI-based exchange between RTP service providers (EPC API specifications)
Payer optionsAccept now · accept later · reject; requests carry an expiry date/time
Funds movementnone — SRTP is messaging only; settlement follows as SCT / SCT Inst
ParticipantsPSPs and licensed non-PSP RTP service providers
Authenticationpayer approves in their own app with SCA (PSD2 Art. 97)

The EPC QR Code standard EPC069-12

The EPC QR Code is the European Payments Council's open standard for scan-to-pay SEPA Credit Transfers. One QR code encodes everything a payment needs — beneficiary name, IBAN, amount and reference — so the payer simply scans it with their own banking app, sees a fully pre-filled transfer, and approves it with one tap.

No card networks, no interchange fees, no manual IBAN typing — and combined with SEPA Instant, the money arrives in seconds. Banking apps in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands already scan it today; when every EEA banking app does, any invoice, checkout or donation box in Europe becomes payable in one scan.

The elements inside an EPC QR code

Service tagBCD
Version002
Character set1 (UTF-8)
IdentificationSCT (SEPA Credit Transfer)
BIC(optional within the EEA)
Beneficiary nameDemo A N
Beneficiary IBANRO35REVO0000172343073545
AmountEUR1.00
Purpose code(optional)
Remittance infounique IBAN per trx
A live example built from the fields on the left — scan it with your banking app and it pre-fills a €1.00 SEPA transfer to the maintainer's Revolut account.