Instant Payments Continue To Expand In Romania: VISTA BANK Becomes The Fifth Banking Institution To Offer Instant Payments To Its Customers
August 09, 2021
Starting today, August 9th, 2021, the group of banks providing Instant Payments adds a new member, VISTA BANK, which, regardless of the difficult period we all went through, made every effort and successfully joined the system offered to banks in Romania by TRANSFOND. The continuous expansion of instant payments shows the service’s usefulness and efficiency, its ease of use and attractiveness for both end consumers and banking institutions.
At the moment, the community of banks that have instant payments in their service portfolio consists of Banca Transilvania, CEC Bank, Libra Internet Bank, Banca Comercială Română and Vista Bank, banks oriented towards innovation, customer satisfaction and anticipating their needs.
The Instant Payment Service ensure money transfer in less than 10 seconds between banks, according to the rules of the payment scheme that governs this payment instrument. In practice, since its launch, the actual duration of the transfer between two participating banks is about 4 seconds. Such a payment can be made at any time (24/7/365), and its individual value falls below 50 thousand Lei. Instant payments are made available to financial services end users, whether they are consumers or businesses, as well as banks and other payment service providers wishing to operate in the local market, allowing one of the most important open-banking requirements to materialize, namely real-time fund transfer between clients. The continuous development of the service keeps Romania on the map of countries aligned to the most modern standards in the field.
”Committed to our strategy to offer high quality services to our customers and transform the customer experience according to their expectations we initiated the project of instant payments together with TRANSFOND. Instant payments will become the new payment standard in the near future changing the payment landscape, since the customers can perform transactions in real time during non-working hours and all the days of the year. We thank TRANSFOND for the excellent collaboration during the implementation of the project.” - stated Georgios Athanasopoulos, General Manager of VISTA BANK
”It is a certainty that, both in Europe and internationally, instant payments will be the standard for conducting electronic transactions and we are convinced that it will become widespread in the Romanian market in a time horizon that we consider quite near. Once the general economic processes are relaunched, we are confident that banks will resume the expected service development speeds and will take the necessary steps to join Instant Payments, given that, from existing practices, providing this service can improve the customer retention rate and can attract new customers.” - said Sabin Carantină, General Manager of TRANSFOND
In terms of payment volumes, the Instant Payments service registered 55% more transactions in the first 7 months of this year compared to the entire year 2020, and the trend is one of permanent growth, from one month to another. With each financial institution enrolled, the network effect amplifies the service addressability, providing end customers with a complete payment experience, which will ultimately be available to any bank or payment account holder.
More specifically, in order to make an instant payment, the payment services end-user does not need to purchase or install any service dedicated application, nor to register in a separate interface for instant payments. The only condition that must be met in order to benefit from instant payments is that the service be provided by the sender’s bank or non-bank payment provider and by the beneficiary’s bank or non-bank payment provider, in particular through mobile and internet banking platforms (although there are already offers of such services available right at the banks physical counters, if a willing customer is not "connected" or "connectable").
About Vista Bank
Vista Bank has been present on the Romanian banking market since 1998, being formerly known as Marfin Bank. Following the taking over in July 2018 by a new, strong shareholders group, one of the largest industrial conglomerates in South East Europe, the bank has seen a significant strengthening of its business, management and strategy. With a network of 31 branches, Vista Bank offers value-added financial solutions and superior, personalized customer service to medium and large corporate clients, as well as affluent customers. For more information: www.vistabank.ro
About TRANSFOND
TRANSFOND is the administrator and operator of the Automated Clearing House for interbank retail payments. The main activity is to provide services to financial and financial-banking institutions, in terms of retail interbank payments in local currency and in euro, both domestic and cross-border. The objective of TRANSFOND is to consolidate and diversify the current activity, with a focus on the IT&C component. Thus, TRANSFOND has developed a series of complex and high-performance solutions for the benefit of wider segments of the domestic financial sector, in particular, but also of all types of local economic operators: Electronic Invoicing services and Electronic Archiving services. For more information: www.transfond.ro, www.aliaspay.ro, www.platiinstant.ro, www.facturielectronice.ro.
