Recently, the Dutch payments community came together for another inspiring edition of the Future of Payments event. It was a day filled with thoughtful conversations, practical insights and honest reflections on where payments are heading, and what it will take to get there.
Projective Group was a proud sponsor and Roderick Kroon, payments expert at Projective Group, took the stage to share insights on Instant Payments, drawing on market research and hands‑on experience supporting banks across Europe as they move beyond implementation milestones.
Instant Payments: lessons learned from the field
One of the central themes of the day was a retrospective on Instant Payments. More than six months after the October 9, 2025 milestone, the focus has clearly shifted from compliance to capability.
During his session, Roderick Kroon shared key findings from Projective Group’s market research into how banks have implemented Instant Payments since the deadline. The picture that emerges is one of solid progress, combined with a growing realisation that Instant Payments often surface deeper dependencies across systems, processes and operating models.
Instant Payments are no longer about meeting a deadline. They are about what organisations choose to build on top of them and how confidently they can scale from there.
Roderick Kroon, Projective Group
Banks that planned beyond the minimum requirements are now better positioned to scale, innovate and respond to customer expectations. Others are entering a second phase of change, where Instant Payments become a catalyst for broader transformation.
From Instant Payments to Instant Banking
The Instant Payments Regulation is now live. In practice, readiness across the ecosystem remains uneven. While some parties are compliant, others still rely on pragmatic, transitional solutions that fall short of full regulatory intent. This raises a real question for the market. Can partially compliant solutions remain acceptable in the short term, or will pressure increase to resolve unhappy instant payment flows that continue to cause friction for clients?
What is becoming clear is that being ready for instant payments does not automatically mean being ready for instant banking. Instant banking places demands far beyond the payments domain alone. Liquidity management, fraud controls, customer service, risk, compliance and operations all need to operate in real time. For many banks, this requires multiple domains to step up together. Without a clear and realistic roadmap, instant capabilities risk remaining fragmented rather than truly end to end.
At the same time, instant payment rails are increasingly seen as an enabler for new products and new rails altogether. Interconnection between instant payment schemes across borders is emerging as the next major step, starting with initiatives such as the cross border EUR to SEK pilot in TARGET Instant Payment Settlement this year. In parallel, market sentiment around the European Payments Initiative and Wero, particularly on pricing and dispute management, may lead to renewed interest in open banking based payment initiation alternatives. The upcoming Third Payment Services Directive, with its promise of more robust and reliable APIs, could further accelerate this shift.
Competition in payments is also moving decisively towards the client interface. End users do not care which rail is used or who provides it. What matters is availability, speed, transparency, cost and safety. As a result, much of the perceived value in payment services is shifting towards the client facing front end.
This creates a strategic tension for banks. Risk management, regulatory accountability and balance sheet responsibility largely remain with them, while value creation increasingly happens in the distribution and interface layer, often owned by others. With a growing number of rails and participants involved, including non bank financial institutions and public actors such as the European Central Bank through initiatives like the digital euro and European digital identity, banks need to rethink how they position themselves.
The question is no longer whether instant payments matter, but how banks can remain, or become, the partner of choice for embedded and instant payment services in a more complex and competitive ecosystem.
Wero, embedded finance and the wider payments landscape
Instant Payments do not exist in isolation. Another key discussion explored how they fit into a broader European payments landscape shaped by Wero, embedded finance, cross‑border payments and cards.
From the stage, Roderick Kroon connected Instant Payments to these wider developments, highlighting that many organisations are now facing strategic choices. How do you integrate new schemes such as Wero without increasing complexity? How do you design once and scale across countries? And how do you ensure that innovation strengthens, rather than fragments, the customer experience?
These are questions we increasingly explore with clients as the payments ecosystem continues to evolve.
Turning insight into action
At Projective Group, this is where we work best. We support financial institutions as they move from regulatory milestones to sustainable capability. From Instant Payments to instant decision‑making, we help teams connect strategy, delivery and day‑to‑day operations in a way that holds up over time. Always side by side with our clients, always grounded in the reality of their organisations.
If the discussions from this event raised questions for your organisation or sparked ideas about what the next phase could look like, we would be happy to continue the conversation. Because turning insight into impact is not about having all the answers. It is about asking the right questions and working through them together.
Many of the themes discussed during the Future of Payments event are explored in more depth in Projective Group’s Journal of Financial Services. At the event, we shared recent editions focused on Future of Payments and How data and AI shape financial services, bringing together market insights, client perspectives and practical examples from across the industry. If you would like to continue the conversation and reflect on what these developments mean for your organisation, you can explore the journals here.
About Projective Group
Projective Group wurde in 2006 gegründet und hat sich seitdem als eine führende Unternehmensberatung im Bereich Finanzdienstleistungen etabliert.
Wir sind in der europäischen Branche dafür bekannt, komplexe Herausforderungen und neue Themen in klare, pragmatische Lösungen umzusetzen. Dank unserer tiefen Verankerung und vertrauensvollen Beziehungen im Finanzdienstleistungssektor verfügen wir über fundiertes Fachwissen in allen Schlüsselbereichen. Wir begleiten den gesamten Veränderungsprozess: von der Strategieentwicklung über die Umsetzung komplexer Transformationen bis hin zum langfristigen Aufbau von Kompetenzen durch Managed Services, Personalvermittlung und Schulungen. Unser Anspruch ist einfach: Finanzdienstleister zu befähigen, die Zukunft von Wohlbefinden, Wachstum und Innovation aktiv mitzugestalten.