Switzerland

ACI’s Take

Swiss financial institutions have been mandated to receive real-time payments by August 2024, with SIC5 (the new Swiss instant payments scheme) likely to become available in 2023.

Many institutions were relaxed about the mandate because the central infrastructure owner, SIX Payments, was initially planning to launch a real-time payments solution that would help them satisfy this requirement. But those plans were indefinitely suspended in 2021, as the market reevaluated requirements and institutions now need to put in place their own solutions. Realizing the potential of IP will rely on overlay services that can help NPP to truly breakout. With the platform generally seen as the rails for most payment types, banks should be confident of long-term success.

Facing a tight deadline, several financial institutions view this as only a compliance mandate cost and not an opportunity to expand, grow and leverage real-time payment capabilities as a revenue generator. Many will be looking at the easiest way to extend their existing infrastructure to satisfy the incoming mandate. A few banks will turn to their core banking providers, software vendors and trusted technology partners to understand how they can help. As a result, this low-level transformation will be relatively simple for them as a very short-term fix, which has raised some concerns from analysts.

Although several banks believe initial real-time payment volumes will be low, this is potentially short-sighted. As we have seen in many other countries that have adopted real-time payments, this is not often the case. The recommendation of several analysts is for banks to think longer term, beyond the initial compliance requirements now. As we have seen in other countries, one mandate is often followed by others (for example, around real-time fraud detection and sending of real-time payments), which often reflects substantial increases in real-time payments. Banks should therefore assess their supplier base, questioning the extent to which current partners have the resources, technology, available proven software or skills to keep up with continuous change and an increasing scope of requirements (especially with digital overlay enhancements). SaaS and PaaS models are highly attractive options for Swiss banks, as they provide the services that not only meet the upcoming 2024 requirements but also provide financial institutions the capabilities to scale at speed and with minimal investment.

Some of the larger Swiss banks are already taking a more strategic approach, investing in deploying their own custom payment platforms with robust, API-driven payment orchestration capabilities that will — eventually — save time and money meeting future mandates and customer requirements (both corporate and retail). For them, cost-effective compliance will be a source of a competitive advantage in the future. Of course, only the very biggest players can contemplate building and maintaining their own platforms, so the rest are encouraged to add similar requirements to the aforementioned assessment of current suppliers.

Finally, experience in other markets shows that real-time payments’ early movers tend to retain their competitiveness, if not jump ahead. Some will stick to the limited scope of the mandate, so the stage is set for the bolder and more forward-thinking members of Switzerland’s agile and innovative financial services community to go further. By developing a roadmap to support end-to-end real-time payments and related, data-enabled overlay services (for consumers and businesses), they can capitalize on a huge emerging opportunity.