The process of adopting instant payment in Romania started in 2018. The service allows the transfer of money in real-time (less than 10 seconds, account to account, P2P or B2C). „As of December 2023, 11 banks covering 75% of the market has already adopted the service, and by the end of 2024 the percentage will increase to almost 90% – says Razvan Faer, Chief Development Officer at TRANSFOND in a Banking 4.0 interview.
„Next step is to bring the instant payments to the retail world.” – he continues.
„Currently, we are building something that could be called the first national paymens scheme in Romania, a mobile payments scheme,” which will run based on the interbank instant payments infrastructure. It will allow everyone to use their mobile phone as a means of payment and as a channel to receive money instantly. The name of the solution is RoPay.”
„It’s not an app, it will be a function of the current mobile bank of each bank that will participate and will be interoperable between banks. We hope to see the pilot working properly in the first part of 2024. At a later stage, probably in 2025, we will start seeing how we can make it interoperable with similar solutions in Europe.”
Răzvan Faer also mentions the purpose proposed with this initiative. „What we hope to achieve? Maybe at the end of 2024, the consumer will be asked how they intend to pay: cash, card or RoPay?”
Once the RoPay function will be put into operation, Razvan Faer says that we can talk about the existence of a basic form of a Request to Pay service in Romania.
„Request to Pay has been on the map of our current development strategy, but it’s a very complex story. To some extent, when RoPay is going to be in place – in the first part of 2024 – one form of Request to Pay will be there. This is because these QR code based payments will actually take place based on a payment request. If you want to split the cost of a lunch with me, you will ask me for a certain amount of money – which is a Payment Request – and then I will pay you that money.„
More details in the interview below
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
