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A European payments and clearing infrastructure operator
Operating instant-payment and interbank clearing across a SEPA-zone banking ecosystem

Delivering an SCT Inst-aligned instant payments rail across a domestic banking ecosystem, running 24/7/365.

A European payments and clearing infrastructure operator needed country-scale instant payments aligned with SEPA Instant Credit Transfer — real-time settlement, 24/7/365 uptime, multi-bank integration, and regulator-grade security. We acted as the technology partner translating business and regulatory requirements into a live platform.

SCT Inst
SEPA Instant Credit Transfer aligned
24/7/365
Real-time operations, no scheduled downtime
Multi-bank
Unified domestic payment ecosystem
The challenge

Hitting SCT Inst latency, availability, and integration targets — without disrupting the systems every domestic bank already relies on.

SEPA Instant Credit Transfer defines the bar: end-to-end settlement in seconds, 24/7/365 availability, reach across every domestic bank, and regulatory and security controls that satisfy both domestic and European oversight.

At country scale, that meant real-time processing without batch-window assumptions, continuous uptime with no scheduled downtime, clean integration with every bank's existing systems, and full reconciliation and audit trails against operational incidents.

On top of the technical scope, the programme had to coordinate participating banks, the regulator, and multiple vendors — all with high expectations on performance and stability.

Our role

Technology partner bridging business requirements and technical implementation across the instant payments programme.

The programme succeeds or fails on the quality of translation between regulatory and business requirements and the engineering choices made at the implementation layer. Senior engineers worked alongside the operator's teams on architecture, integration, and production readiness.

Major technical and business decisions ran through joint design and review sessions with the operator — with Kodelab responsible for making sure those decisions held up to the regulatory, performance, and availability obligations that govern this class of payments infrastructure.

The approach

How the engagement was delivered.

Target architecture and real-time processing design

  • Target system architecture for a 24/7/365 platform clearing transactions within the SCT Inst time envelope.
  • Real-time processing logic: validation, routing, settlement, confirmation — including the exception paths that govern failed steps.
  • High-availability patterns, redundancy, and failover designed for country-scale infrastructure with no planned downtime.

Integration across the domestic banking ecosystem

  • Integrated with participating banks and their existing payment systems, accommodating each bank's interfaces and operational constraints.
  • Connectivity and routing designed for the real-time, multi-party nature of instant payments — where every participant has to respond within milliseconds.
  • Coordinated integration activities across banks, the regulator, and supporting vendors through to go-live.

Risk, dependency, and production-readiness management

  • Structured risk and dependency management so cross-party blockers surfaced early, not at the eve of go-live.
  • Functional, performance, and stress testing against the latency and throughput SLAs the platform had to honour.
  • End-to-end production-readiness validation and rollout support through to go-live.
The results

A live real-time payments platform settling in seconds, 24/7/365, across the domestic bank ecosystem.

The platform went live as a country-scale instant payments infrastructure — credit transfers between participating banks clear in seconds, not hours, and the system runs continuously with no scheduled downtime.

The domestic bank ecosystem is unified onto a single real-time payments surface rather than a patchwork of bilateral arrangements. The same platform supports the roadmap for next-generation services including request-to-pay and open banking use cases that assume real-time settlement.

Why it matters

Instant payments are the foundation for every real-time financial service that comes after them.

Real-time settlement is what unlocks the rest of the modern digital economy — payroll that moves as work ends, merchant payments that clear before the customer leaves, government transfers that arrive the same day.

The platform puts the market on the real-time economy rails that European interoperability and the next generation of open banking use cases depend on — infrastructure that keeps compounding in value with every service layered on top.

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