STET's CORE platform processed 18 billion interbank transactions across France and Belgium in 2025, a modest increase from 17.7 billion in 2024 that masks a significant shift in the composition of payment flows. Instant payments now account for 20 percent of all credit transfers in France and 25 percent in Belgium, up from single-digit shares just three years ago.
The 2025 results confirm STET's position as one of Europe's largest retail payment processors by transaction count, serving the combined French and Belgian banking communities. Card authorization volumes reached 15 billion transactions annually, with peak daily throughput hitting 60 million card operations on 28-29 November 2025, coinciding with Black Friday. Tokenized payment processing exceeded 1.5 billion transactions, a 64 percent increase over 2024, driven by near-complete onboarding of French card issuers for mobile digital payment credentials.
Infrastructure performance held at above 99.999 percent availability, with system-attributable failures running below one in a million transactions. Processing capacity stands at 2,500 transactions per second, sufficient for current peaks but a figure that will face growing pressure as instant payment adoption accelerates and the EU's Instant Payments Regulation takes full effect.
The instant payment trajectory in France carries particular weight for the broader SEPA market. At 20 percent of credit transfers, France's adoption rate remains lower than several smaller European markets that have already crossed the 50 percent threshold. But the absolute volumes are substantial given France's position as the eurozone's second-largest economy by GDP and its deep consumer banking market. Belgium's 25 percent instant share, processed through STET's CORE(BE) platform that handled over 1.4 billion transactions in 2024, demonstrates that higher adoption is achievable within the same technical infrastructure.
STET's competitive position strengthens further in April 2026 when Adyen becomes a direct participant, one of the first non-bank payment service providers to gain direct access to both French card clearing and interbank settlement infrastructure. This follows STET's April 2025 update to access criteria enabling payment institutions and electronic money institutions as direct participants, compliant with the amended Settlement Finality Directive. STET is also deploying Click-to-Pay services through a partnership with Giesecke+Devrient and evaluating sovereign cloud infrastructure options for future capacity.
The central strategic question for STET is whether instant payment growth will erode batch processing revenues that still account for four-fifths of French credit transfer volumes. With the Instant Payments Regulation requiring all PSPs to offer instant services at charges no higher than standard credit transfer fees, the economic rationale for maintaining separate batch and instant pricing structures is disappearing. STET's integrated platform, processing both channels on shared infrastructure, positions it to absorb this transition more efficiently than operators running parallel batch and instant systems. The next twelve months will show whether France's instant adoption curve steepens toward the levels already seen in smaller European markets or whether the inertia of established batch workflows in corporate treasury and payroll holds the rate closer to its current level.