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The Spanish national payment network processed 570m instant payment transactions in 2021, beating all the countries in the eurozone, including the Netherlands or Belgium, Iberpay has said.
The use of instant payments in Spain more than doubled last year and is five times what it was two years ago, Iberpay, which manages the domestic payments system, said.
In 2021, 43 percent of all transactions processed on the national payment network SNCE were instant payments, which is more than four times the EU average of 10 percent.
Spaniards made 570m instant payments in 2021 for a total value of €83bn.
According to Iberpay, this puts Spain top among eurozone countries in terms of usage of instant payments, ahead of the Netherlands or Belgium.
On its peak days, instant payments made within the country exceeded 2m transactions and sometimes it logged 50 transactions per second.
Despite this strong showing, there is ample opportunity for further growth of volumes across Spain. For example, 570m transactions represents an equivalent of 12 transactions per capita.
By comparison, in Thailand, whose instant payments system PromptPay launched just a year before Iberpay, there were 144 instant payment transactions per capita in 2021, while elsewhere in Europe there were equivalent figures of 51 in the UK and 73 in Sweden.
Overlays driving growth
The great upward surge in instant payment volumes in Spain is largely powered by the success of local mobile payments app Bizum, which runs across the SNCE rails, and contributes the vast majority of instant payments in terms of number of transactions.
Launched by Spanish banks in 2016, Bizum was initially developed to support immediate P2P payments, allowing Spanish users to pay one another using just their mobile phone number.
According to a January 2022 Bizum press release, it had processed 505m P2P transactions in 2021 with a total value of €26bn.
With 19m users, Bizum has recently expanded its payment offering beyond P2P to target and support retailer payments across the country’s lucrative e-commerce market.
Account-to-account grows in Spain
Growth in instant payments volumes in 2021 has significantly contributed to the strong growth in volumes of Spanish account-to-account payments.
Last year, the SNCE processed 2.5bn transactions across all payment times (including SEPA credit transfer, SEPA direct debit and SEPA Instant credit transfer), representing a 14.6 percent increase compared with 2020. To put this in context, between 2017 and 2020, average annual growth of payments was just 3.5 percent. According to Iberpay, it processes 10m transactions on average a day, with a value of around €9bn.
The total number of transactions across SNCE also increased by 323m in 2021, of which the vast majority (308m) can be attributed to the new instant payment service.
The significance of this growth is it suggests that instant payments are primarily supporting growth through new use cases, such as P2P, rather than cannibalising volumes from existing payment methods.
However, it is also worth noting that in 2020, only 58 percent of Spanish credit transfers were processed across the SNCE, with the remaining 42 percent being processed either by other systems or funds moved internally within the same financial institution (on-us transactions).
To improve interoperability and liquidity efficiency savings for its instant payments service, especially for cross-border euro area payments, Spain migrated its technical accounts from TARGET2 to the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) system in December.
