The driving idea of providing payment service providers at the point of sale - i.e. in bricks-and-mortar retail and online shops - with an alternative payment method in the form of SEPA Instant Payments is having an increasing impact on traditional corporate banking. This in turn influences the day-to-day business of treasurers, whose task it is to ensure the company remains solvent at all times.

Of particular interest in this context are incoming payments - for example customer payments from an online store - , outgoing payments and provision of short-term liquidity. In future, SEPA Instant Payments can be used on a 24/7/365 basis for supplier payments, tax payments, salary payments, currency hedging transactions or M&A transactions. The limit on payment amounts can also be removed at a customer's request. Every additional day for which allows the company to meet its liabilities also impacts working capital management.

Incoming payments to bank accounts are credited as SEPA Instant Payments in a matter of seconds, even at weekends and on public holidays, around the clock and in real time. This means that the utilisation of funds in the form of treasury transfers and interest optimization can also take place in real time. Cut-off times lose their significance - value dates at weekends and on public holidays become the norm.

Other requirements

As these instant payments may not be settled at higher costs than standard SEPA transfers, they could become the "new normal", a development which is already widely predicted. However, this "new normal" places completely new demands on the organisation of treasury departments, treasury systems and the range of services offered by banks.

Global corporations already manage their worldwide cash holdings around the clock. This is done in three-shift operation during normal working hours from decentralised treasury departments in different time zones. This means that employees are always "on-line".

In European SMEs, however, treasury departments are often organised centrally and operate with limited personnel capacity. This makes it all the more important to further automate processes by using suitable cash management and intelligent payment solutions.

Outgoing external payments must be automatically transferred from ERP systems and sent to the bank on the scheduled due date with the corresponding value date. Authorisation processes must take place upstream and asynchronously to the submission of the payments, or automatically via a corporate seal.

Global account statements must also be collected automatically and immediately reconciled against the planned cash balances. Banks credit instant payment to the corporate accounts within seconds and inform the customer at the same time. Based on the stored cash pool agreements, an immediate intra-day transfer is made to the bank as a service. Alternatively, the customer system optimizes the cash position in real time or carries out end-of-day target balancing independently at predefined times.

With the right systems for real-time cash management, even small treasury departments can achieve significant added value through automation based on the new SEPA Instant Payments without having to adjust their usual working hours.