SIA won the tender to connect ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, to EBA Clearing’s pan-European instant payments infrastructure RT1. Thanks to SIAnet, the fiber optic network with high speed and low latency stretching over 170,000 kilometers, ABN AMRO was one of the early users to introduce instant payments.

As of November 21 2017, clients of ABN AMRO can execute instant payments up to 15,000 euros in less than 10 seconds, 24/7, all year long, to other banks that participate in Instant Payments. The number of participants and, hence, the number of transactions is expected to grow in the course of 2018.

The network infrastructure SIAnet is specially designed to meet the specific requirements of instant payments in terms of security, reliability, ease of integration with any application environment and compliance with SEPA’s Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme created by the European Payments Council.

“The success in the ABN AMRO bid further strengthens SIA’s position at international level and proves the technological capabilities of its network services solutions”,commented Cristina Astore, Director of SIA’s International Division. “We continue to leverage our developments of real-time 24/7 solutions enabling our customer to easily benefit from new instant payments services”.

Sandra Peute, Business developer for SEPA Payments at ABN AMRO: “ABN AMRO is very pleased with the service quality and operational excellence of SIA. We are looking forward, with much confidence, to a substantial growth of Instant Payments in Europe!”