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A surge in instant payments made by the central bank’s SEPA product has prompted it to consider new functionalities.
"The number of instant payments is rapidly approaching half of all payments made through CENTROlink. This shows that consumers are increasingly using modern payment services,” said Tomas Karpavičius, executive director of market infrastructure at the Bank of Lithuania.
This market is growing rapidly, said Karpavičius. “The Bank of Lithuania will continue to implement innovations to make payments even more convenient for both residents and businesses.”
First launched in 2015, CENTROlink is the payment system of the Bank of Lithuania.
It provides the technical possibility to connect to SEPA and the TARGET2 settlement system through the infrastructure of the Bank of Lithuania to licensed payment service providers (PSPs) from countries in the European Economic Area (EEA).
Once logged into the system, they can offer instant payments 24 hours a day, excluding holidays, as well as standard credit transfers and direct debit services.
In 2022, the total number of transactions made through CENTROlink increased almost 50 percent to 276m, while the value of all payments increased by a third to €477bn. During this time, the number of instant payments transactions doubled to €128m.
The Bank of Lithuania has stated that it is taking the needs of the market into account and evaluating the possibilities of supplementing the CENTROlink system with a new "Request-To-Pay" functionality.
“It would provide an opportunity to conveniently confirm, delay or reject payments for services received, goods purchased and make other payments from your account in real time,” the central bank says.
Currently, CENTROlink services are used by almost 150 payment service providers from 19 EEA countries.
Meanwhile, Lithuania’s finance ministry has announced it intends to join CENTROlink later this year.
This will enable more prompt and efficient execution of state treasury payments and make it possible to provide payment infrastructure access tools for other participants in this system, according to the central bank.
