Insights

The revolution of Financial Transfers across borders continues for an increasingly digitalized, fair, and efficient Europe.

The recent approval by the European Parliament of new regulations on instant payments marks a new turning point in the payments landscape within the European Union.

The recent provisions, which will come into effect 20 days after publication in the Official Journal of the EU, aim to ensure the promptness of money transfers between consumers' and businesses' accounts, representing a significant step towards greater financial efficiency and security.

With the new rules, all payment service providers must offer customers the possibility to make instant transfers that take no longer than ten seconds from approval, at any time and day. This will result in almost immediate liquidity for individuals and businesses, promising to significantly improve the daily operations of millions of Europeans. Additionally, the costs of instant payments must not exceed those of regular transfers.

The new regulation also outlines an efficient process for handling multiple orders of instant fund transfers sent in bundles to Payment Service Providers (PSPs), with particular attention to businesses in business-to-business (B2B) payments. When a Payment Service User (PSU) sends a package of instant fund transfer orders, the receiving PSP must immediately split the package, turning each order into individual transactions of instant credit transfer.

Furthermore, currently, payment and electronic money institutions are excluded from the definition of "entity" in Directive 98/26/EC, limiting their participation in instant euro transfers. The regulation aims to include them, allowing them to participate in Payment Systems and contribute to the adoption of instant fund transfers.

Another significant aspect of the regulation is the applicability of the new rules even in member countries that do not use the euro as the official currency, provided their bank accounts support regular euro transactions. This will ensure widespread sharing of the benefits of instant payments, further promoting economic integration among EU countries.

The new regulation emphasizes the importance of anti-fraud measures, requiring payment service providers to implement advanced fraud prevention systems and offering consumers tools to limit risks, such as the ability to set a maximum amount for instant transfers.

One of the main novelties is also the obligation for payment service providers to verify the correspondence of beneficiary names and IBANs for all transactions.

Additionally, the regulation ensures universal access to instant euro fund transfers for all Payment Service Users (PSUs). It states that there should be no disparities in the channels used to initiate instant payments compared to other types of fund transfers.

TAS's solution for Instant Payments fully covers compliance with the new regulation, with the possibility of adopting the platform modularly and as a service.

Thanks to ur long-standing relationships with most Italian banks, TAS has become a leader in Instant Payments solutions in Italy and has in-depth market knowledge and a unique ability to meet the needs of financial institutions in the product adoption journey.

With its expansion across Europe, TAS is well-positioned to drive innovation in the instant payments sector, offering a comprehensive, modular, and innovative solution that meets the needs of Italian and European banks.

Our commitment is indeed to be a true partner for banks, working closely with them to understand and meet their specific needs.

The modularity of the solution allows banks to choose only the necessary components and design a tailored architecture based on their specific requirements. Additionally, our solutions are based on a modern architecture designed to ensure complete service continuity, with real-time operations 24 hours a day.

Our offering model is based on a very flexible approach and can be implemented in the cloud, on-premises, or in SaaS mode, allowing for rapid and effective time to market.

Key features of TAS solution:

• Full compliance with SEPA Inst protocol requirements: complete processing time <10 sec., Timeout management.
• Cloud-native platform: for a turnkey offering with real-time 24 × 7 operations.
• Omni-channel: corporate portal, retail banking, back-office, etc.
• API interfaces: for payment initiation, reachability, and message requests.
• Message enhancement: message data enrichment through integration with core banking.
• Message screening: message verification through integration with screening systems (e.g., AML, Fraud, etc.).
• Message pairing and r-messages: Pairing of related messages and management of r-messages.
• "Four Eyes" principle: workflow can be defined with multilevel approval processes wherever necessary.
• Error alert: notifications can be sent in case of errors.
• Scalability and fault tolerance: the solution ensures full vertical and horizontal scalability.
• Certified full SWIFT message interface: the message network interface is a fully certified SWIFT application.

Contact our experts to find out how TAS can support you in implementing fast, effective, secure, and fully compliant solutions with the new regulations.

Piteco strengthens its role as an international banking connectivity hub through the collaboration with TAS and consolidates its footprint as an effective tool to support business growth.

Thanks to Piteco’s treasury solutions and TAS's Service Bureau, accessing to the most important banking interconnection channel becomes plug and play for the benefit of large corporates and SMEs

The integration with TAS allows Piteco to offer SWIFT connectivity in the cloud with significant savings in costs and implementation time

Milan, 16 March 2022 - Agreement signed between Piteco (PITE: IM), an Italian software house delivering corporate treasury and financial planning management solutions, and TAS (TAS: EXM), specialized in software solutions for e-money, payments and financial services. This strategic collaboration starts with the aim of supporting the international growth strategies of corporates by simplifying their access to the SWIFT network - Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication - the main network used by banks for fast and secure cross-border payments. Thanks to the cloud integration of TAS's Swift Service Bureau with Piteco software, a single platform is unlocked, capable of providing seamless SaaS access to SWIFTnet. The use of the cloud guarantees a rapid activation of the service - which becomes plug and play - generating savings for businesses in terms of economic investment and time required to go live, while ensuring all the security that the cloud can guarantee today. User profiling, access control, Segregation of Duty, Audit Log, Privacy, authentication methods and Active Directory / LDAP are just some of the aspects and functions that Piteco manages with the utmost attention during the implementation of its SaaS solutions. The simplicity and efficiency of the newly embedded SWIFT access enables faster adoption by smaller companies with a strong vocation for international markets, who need to manage finance in a centralized and automated way. In Italy there are many SMEs expressing excellence and entrepreneurial ability, who look beyond domestic borders, making a decisive contribution to Italian exports. Through its comprehensive banking connectivity hub, Piteco normalizes and processes various international messaging protocols used by corporate treasuries to initiate payments or receive bank statements. Piteco’s hub integrates the corporates authorization workflows and allows payments to be made nationally or internationally in a safe, efficient and highly automated way, with the convenience and advantage for business managers of being able to approve them anywhere via web or mobile apps. “The strategic nature of the SWIFT network is now quite evident. We are talking about a universal, secure interchange infrastructure, with more than 11 thousand different member companies in over 200 countries, exchanging over 42 million messages daily. An impressive number, that has been growing also thanks to the digitization imposed by the pandemic”- commented Paolo Virenti, CEO of Piteco. "The partnership with TAS gives us the opportunity to integrate our software with even more ease with all the banking counterparties in the world, - continues Virenti - through the creation of a single platform we are able to simplify our customer management, and complete definitively our identity as an international banking connectivity hub and, above all, an effective tool to support the growth of companies. A role that sees us daily committed to developing solutions and agreements that can, as in this case, lead to functionalities that make it possible to lighten the work of the CFOs of large companies, and increasingly also of small and medium ones, helping them to better manage the governance of cash flows and thus freeing up precious time to define strategies ". Valentino Bravi, CEO of TAS, adds: "By creating an integrated operating model with an Italian excellence such as Piteco, TAS confirms its role of enabler of payment services for corporates and their integration with the financial industry. This collaboration model confirms the great potential, that in my opinion is still partially unexpressed, available for Italian excellences in the digitalization sector to grasp both in the domestic and international market." Partnering with TAS once again underlines the ability of Piteco, constantly committed to the integration of innovative solutions, to support CFOs of national and international corporates in their daily activities. The most advanced treasury solutions available on the market and delivered in the cloud combined with banking connectivity in fact allow CFOs to manage treasury flows even more effectively. Thanks to the automation of data collection and analysis, CFOs will enjoy a single centralized view of corporate data around the world, updated in real time. The collaboration between Piteco and TAS Group is not limited to the SWIFT theme, it will also extend to the field of Open Banking and Open Finance with the aim of fully exploiting all the opportunities offered by the European PSD2 regulation. Download the Press Release

Time is running out. All banks today offering instant payments (SCT INST) and reachable in TARGET2, must become reachable in TIPS before the end of the year. The ECB has defined three options for European Instant Payment interoperability and whichever model Banks choose, TAS is able to accelerate and ease the process and boost compliance efficiency. Further highlighting a commitment to the goal of increased interoperability, reachability and take up of Instant Payments in Europe, the European Commission has launched an assessment on the need for an EU-wide instant payments scheme. The initiative will investigate whether: new legislation is needed, non-legislative measures would be appropriate, or other policy options are suitable. The deadline for submitting feedback is midnight (CET) on 7 April 2021. Click here to have your say. Find out which option is best for you to be reachable in TIPS and contact us for a free consultancy.

Milan, Italy – 21 December 2020 – TAS Group, a leading provider of digital payments, liquidity management and financial messaging software solutions, today announced that it has received global acceptance by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) to support SWIFT’s Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) message specifications, joining the exclusive ranks of certified providers around the world. TAS Network Gateway platform, recently enhanced for the 2020 November change, and Aquarius – TAS leading Liquidity Management solution, are both now ready to support the new ISO 20022 standard, in addition to the legacy SWIFT-MT financial messages, to send and receive cross-border payments and to manage reporting. “TAS’ commitment to bridge compliance complexities for banks in the payments space is stronger than ever,” said Gianpiero Caretti, Senior Business Development Manager at TAS International. “Our financial messaging solutions sit at the heart of the Eurosystem’s payments and securities settlement infrastructures, and are continuously evolved to support changing and emerging standards as well as market infrastructure protocols.” “TAS helps banks to decouple their applications from the network technicalities and simplifies legacy modernization, enabling them to be more competitive. Our 30+ years of collaboration with SWIFT and vast experience in ISO 20022 compliance worldwide can ease the adoption path for any type of PSP worldwide,” he added. TAS Network Gateway, as well as the certified SWIFT Service Bureau operated by TAS, are built on state-of-the-art, enterprise-class, highly secure technologies, coupled with a powerful set of APIs and ISO 20022-ready adapters, all delivered either on-premise or in the cloud. SWIFT CBPR+ Ready: check out the official vendor list Download the press release

During TAS Group’s workshop at the recent Payvolution virtual event, Stefano Macchi, Global Payments’ subject matter expert, illustrated the great potential of the new SEPA standard developed by the EPC. R2P, together with instant payments and open banking, enables PSPs to offer a more digital, efficient and end-to-end user experience, irrespective of the target segment: consumer, business customer, merchant or public admin.

While the actual roll-out of the standard has been postponed to March 1 2021, from a technical point of view, everything is ready for the first initiative launched by EBA Clearing, whose testing phase began in July, with 27 partners from the financial world from 11 European countries that have joined the project.

R2P is not an additional payment instrument but a new, all-digital way of requesting a payment for which a payee and a payer electronically exchange structured data through a message workflow, before exchanging money. Being initiated by the creditor, R2P allows for a 100% automatic reconciliation of the subsequent payment, even if done in several instalments and deferred instead of in real time.

On the application platforms and channels of TAS, a series of competitive services for customers on both the beneficiary / payee side and the customer / payer side are created on the basis of calls to the standard R2P infrastructure. These services integrate domestic use cases already implemented in the PayTAS scenarios for B2G / C2G interaction as well as on CBI Globe (the leading Italian Open Banking Ecosystem standard), but are ready for billers, PSPs and clients throughout the entire SEPA area.

The Consolidated T2/T2S platform goes live in 2021 and banks have to adapt their access mode to reach the Eurosystem,especially those who currently connect to T2 over the Internet, since this will no longer be allowed. In order to help T2 participants easily comply with the new mandatory ESMIG interface, TAS Group developed PAG€, the first cloud-based, easy and scalable solution that embeds certified NSP connectivity for a smooth and transparent migration. With its user friendly interface, PAG€ allows quick access to the Eurosystem Targ€t Services, enabling both U2A and A2A functionalities, through an agile and secure cloud service that guarantees all the standards required by the new ESMIG interface. What makes PAG€ so powerful is the cutting-edge technology at its core: PAG€ is the result of a combination of TAS leading-edge technology and over 35 years of payments experience in mission-critical market infrastructures, Amazon Web Services (AWS) secure cloud and accredited NSP connectivity. Discover more

Milan, 21 January 2020 - TAS SpA (BIT: TAS), a leading European provider of software and services for banking and financial applications, today announced that already 12 banks and interbank service centers have chosen to adopt TAS Group’s solutions to prepare for the Target2/T2S Consolidation Project, that will go live in November 2022. A further 11 market operators have to date signed with TAS Group since the first contract assignment by CASSA DEPOSITI E PRESTITI in Q2 2019, who selected Aquarius to manage the Target2/T2S Consolidation Project and its impacts pre- and post-migration. For over 20 years, TAS Group has been assisting the Eurosystem's Commercial and Central Banks in harmonizing infrastructures, from the Italian RTGS BIREL migration to the first Pan-European TARGET infrastructure, up to the latest evolutions of the European Central Bank's T2, TIPS, T2S and Collateral Management infrastructures. Traditionally renowned for its network management solutions, such as TAS Network Gateway, today TAS Group is rapidly increasing its market presence also thanks to Aquarius, the platform that strategically accelerates the digital transformation of Treasuries by facilitating migrations towards the ISO 20022 standard, instant settlement and real-time intraday liquidity management. The consolidation of the Target2 and T2-Securities infrastructures will happen with a big-bang approach that will mark the birth of a new real-time settlement infrastructure for cash, securities and collateral, with a single entry point for all European Financial markets operators (Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway, ESMIG), and the aim of increasing efficiency and optimizing liquidity management for all TARGET services. Impacts deriving from the Consolidation Project requirements will affect the banks’ treasury role significantly. However, regulatory compliance can be turned into an opportunity for banks to deliver real digital transformation by adopting technologies that allow them to automate manual activities, integrate richer information and evolve legacy applications to take advantage of real-time business intelligence on intraday liquidity and forecasts. “The market has understood that regulatory projects can present resources and opportunities for digital transformation in banks and trusts TAS for its innovative solutions and skills. Thanks also to the excellent contribution of our Partners, to date 12 customers have already adopted our solutions to prepare for the migration to the new T2-T2S system," said Valentino Bravi, CEO, TAS Group. “Our deals won portfolio is rapidly increasing, and in the coming months we expect to gain over 80% of the Italian market and to acquire new international references as well.” Last year, TAS Group, together with KPMG and Accenture, collected and coordinated an Interbank Working Group for the T2/T2S Consolidation Project to which over 30 market operators have joined, confirming itself as the undisputed leader in terms of technology enabling the centralized management of securities, cash and collateral. Download the press release