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Continued growth of instant payments

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Over the past five years, the number of instant payments — lightning-fast account-to-account transfers — between different banks in the Netherlands has increased by 36%. In 2020, 372 million instant payments were processed between different banks, and in 2025, that number rose to 505 million. In 2019, the Netherlands was the first eurozone country to introduce instant payments on a large scale. Since then, it has become the standard method of transferring money between banks. The strong growth is partly due to the increasing use of instant payments for business batch payments.

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Batch payments are large numbers of payments that companies and institutions submit to banks in bulk, for example for monthly salaries, benefits, and allowances. Banks usually process these batch payments during off-peak hours, late at night. With instant payments, batch payments appear in the recipients’ accounts a few seconds later, even on weekends and public holidays. Regular transfers are only processed on business days and are then credited to the recipients’ accounts in the morning. Banks can process batch payments as instant payments or as regular transfers, depending on the available capacity in their systems.

Instant payments for batch payments can be useful and beneficial for recurring payments and one-off payments that customers have scheduled themselves via mobile banking or internet banking, amongst others. For all payments from all customers scheduled for a Saturday, Sunday, or public holiday, the amount will still be credited to the accounts of all recipients on the same day. They can also be useful for daily or weekly wage payments to hospitality staff without fixed contracts and working hours. These employees will then have access to their daily or weekly wages immediately and must not wait until Monday morning. For batch payments scheduled on a working day, instant payments add little value.

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