The European Central Bank published its payments statistics for the first half of 2025 on 29 January 2026, revealing that instant credit transfers accounted for 23 percent of the total number of credit transfer transactions processed by euro area retail payment systems. By value, instant credit transfers represented 7 percent of total credit transfer value. The share nearly doubled from the first half of 2024, when instant credit transfers accounted for approximately 15 percent of credit transfer volume.
The acceleration in adoption coincides with the first major deadline under the EU Instant Payments Regulation. Since 9 January 2025, all payment service providers in the eurozone have been required to receive instant credit transfers in euro. The sending mandate, requiring PSPs to offer instant payment initiation, followed on 9 October 2025. EBA Clearing confirmed that its RT1 and STEP2 user communities successfully completed the changeover on that date, with close to 50 participants going live with the Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection Verification of Payee service simultaneously.
Total credit transfers in the euro area reached 16.8 billion transactions with a combined value of EUR 107.3 trillion in the first half of 2025, a 6.5 percent increase in transaction volume compared with the same period a year earlier. The broader non-cash payment landscape also grew, with 77.7 billion transactions totaling EUR 116.0 trillion in the euro area, up 7.7 percent by volume.
EBA Clearing's RT1 instant payment service reported daily volumes rising steadily through 2025, averaging 6 million transactions per day by November and reaching 6.7 million on weekdays. The service recorded a single-day peak of 9.6 million transactions in early December, following a 9.1 million spike on Black Friday. February 2025 had previously set all-time records for both daily transaction volume and value. The Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement service processed 1.35 billion transactions across all currencies in 2024, representing a fivefold increase year-on-year, with daily volumes continuing their upward trajectory into 2025.