The expansion of SEPA Instant Payments has changed the practical meaning of payment readiness in Europe. Euro area payment service providers have moved through the key 2025 deadlines for receiving and sending instant credit transfers, and ten-second, 24/7 movement of funds is becoming embedded in the market. For electronic money institutions, faster rails are becoming part of everyday financial activity. The more important question is whether the operating model can carry the pressure that real-time movement creates.In batch-based environments, time acted as an invisible control. Payments could sit in a settlement window while fraud checks, sanctions screening, liquidity reviews and reconciliation processes caught up around them. Real-time rails remove much of that space. A payment can be initiated outside normal business hours, pass through compliance checks, affect liquidity and create an exception before a human team would traditionally have reviewed the flow.EMIs preparing for this environment should start with fraud controls, liquidity management and reconciliation. These functions are often discussed separately, yet real-time payments make them part of the same infrastructure problem. The institutions that scale best will be those that connect these areas early, before manual fixes become the default response to rising volumes.First, build fraud controls for precisionThe first priority is to understand how fraud risk changes when payment movement accelerates. The EBA and ECB reported €4.2 billion of payment fraud across the European Economic Area in 2024, with credit transfers and card payments accounting for most of the value lost. In credit transfers, a large share of losses was linked to scams where users were manipulated into authorising the payment themselves. Real-time payments reduce the window in which suspicious behaviour can be questioned before money moves.For EMIs, stronger controls need to be precise. Many serve digital businesses where customer experience, approval rates and transaction reliability are commercially important. If fraud systems become too aggressive, genuine customers are impacted, merchants face disruption and operational teams are left to manage avoidable reviews.EMIs should prioritise risk models that assess the transaction, account history, device behaviour, beneficiary patterns and customer context together. The aim is to identify the payments that require intervention while keeping legitimate flows moving. Compliance and fraud tools therefore need to sit close to the payment engine, rather than operating as a separate layer that reacts after the event.Second, make liquidity visible before pressure buildsInstant payments create a different treasury problem because funds can move continuously while the systems used to manage liquidity, FX and settlement do not always operate 24/7. Institutions need liquidity in the right place at the right time, including weekends and public holidays, when active rebalancing may be limited.Real-time payment readiness quickly becomes a capital efficiency issue. Prefunding gives institutions confidence that payments can be completed, but excess prefunding traps capital. Underfunding creates failed payments, delayed settlement and client frustration. As volumes grow, managing this balance manually becomes difficult.EMIs should treat liquidity visibility as a core part of payment infrastructure. They need to understand expected flows by currency, customer segment and time of day. Automated alerts and rebalancing logic should respond before a position becomes strained. Cross-border activity makes this more important because foreign exchange availability, settlement timing and client demand may not align neatly.Third, design reconciliation for continuous exception handlingReconciliation is often where the cost of real-time payments appears later, after the front-end experience has improved. In batch environments, finance and operations teams could reconcile at intervals. Real-time payments create a continuous stream of balance movements, confirmations, failed transfers, reversals and disputes.If reconciliation remains separate from the payment flow, exceptions can accumulate quickly. A failed payment at midnight, a mismatch between ledgers, or a delayed confirmation from a partner cannot wait for the next working day once clients expect the system to operate continuously. The operational burden then grows in the background until it becomes a scaling constraint.EMIs should build reconciliation into the payment architecture from the beginning. Payment status, ledger movement, settlement confirmation and client reporting need to be integrated into the same operational framework, so exceptions can be identified and resolved as they occur. Exception handling should be automated where possible, with clear escalation for cases that require human review. Building for operational readinessFor EMIs, the practical priority is to make sure fraud controls, liquidity management and reconciliation processes can operate in real time before transaction volumes increase. As instant payments move from opt-in to standard across the euro area, the next phase of SEPA Instant adoption opens a clearer path for EMIs that have already addressed the operational infrastructure. Sound fraud controls, liquidity visibility and reconciliation architecture become points of differentiation as volumes grow and the tolerance for operational gaps narrows across the market. SEPA Instant is also drawing more cross-border corridors into scope, which adds complexity around FX availability, multi-currency liquidity and partner settlement timing. EMIs operating across several markets will need infrastructure that holds consistently across jurisdictions. That is where the next competitive separation is likely to occur, and it rewards institutions that addressed operational depth early rather than patching it as volume grows.No#RealTimePayments #EMISerhii ZakharovCEO and FounderPayDo26 Jun, 2026