Societe Generale Debuts Instant Corporate Payments

French bank Societe Generale is rolling out pan-European instant payments for its corporate clients, and is deploying technology from FIS to support the launch, the companies said Monday (Sept. 23).

FIS will deploy its Payments-as-a-Service solution to loop Societe Generale into the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme, which enables faster, transparent payments, and will offer that capability to its European corporate customers, the bank said.

“Our corporate clients are hungry for the speed, flexibility and improved liquidity enabled by real-time payments,” said Societe Generale Head of Payments and Cash Management Solutions Nicolas Cailly in a statement. “The FIS Payments-as-a-Service provided a proven, cost-effective platform for us to move to real-time payments and provide the benefits of the SCT Inst scheme to our clients across Europe.”

In another statement, FIS president, banking solutions Bruce Lowthers said that more financial institutions are eager to adopt real-time payments for their clients, and linking with firms like FIS can enable those banks to more quickly deploy faster payment offerings and remain competitive.

SCT Inst is nearing its two-year anniversary, but Javier Santamaria, chair of the European Payments Council, told PYMNTS last year that the scheme remains in its early days.

“It is not easy for institutions” to adopt SCT Inst, he said, but because it supports both domestic and cross-border transactions, there is a strong imperative for payment service providers and banks to adopt the tool.

Collaborating with payment service providers to connect into instant payment schemes like SCT Inst will be key to adoption. Earlier this year,  Deutsche Bank announced a collaboration with Serrala, for example, to connect corporate customers of the bank to the SCT Inst scheme through their enterprise resource planning platform via an application programming interface (API).

“Instant Payments are revolutionizing payment structures,” said Serrala Chief Domestic Officer Stephan Benkendorf in a statement at the time. “Our API transforms payment processing from scheduled batch payments to real-time processing, accelerating payments significantly.”