Instant payments are now available in Switzerland

Baptiste Wicht

Baptiste Wicht

The Poor Swiss
Staff member
Hi,

As of yesterday, the Swiss banking system has been upgraded to support instant payments. These payments will be made in less than 10 seconds, and they can be done at any time (24 hours per day and 365 days per year).

Will that change anything? Not really. These new instant payments are optional, so you have to select for each payment which system you want. So, most payments will still be the old slugs we know.

Will it be free? Each bank will be free to charge anything for these outgoing payments (incoming should always be free). For instance, at UBS, it will cost 5 CHF to make an instant payment and Raiffeisen recommends 2 CHF. Apparently, HBL will not charge anything, so it is good news that not all banks have opted for greed.

Currently, very few banks have implemented outgoing instant payments, but this will likely come in the coming months.

This could be useful in some niche emergency cases, but overall, I don't think this new system will change anything.

What do you think?
 
I think this is a great feature going forward; it will be useful if you use two banks. I use Radicant as a main bank and send money to Revolut for my daily expenses on a monthly basis. This means I can send money on the weekends, if the beginning of the month happens to be on a Saturday, it's simply more convenient.

But from what I've read (https://insideparadeplatz.ch/2024/08/20/ready-steady-instant-posse/) banks only have to be able to receive the funds instantly, they don't have to send it instantly, only a few couple of banks offer that at the moment. Am I understanding that right?

Curious to see what this will mean for Twint down the line.
 
Yuh seems to have this implemented for free. You also can't select any option, it just goes through immediately.

I was a bit shocked yesterday, as I'm used to the scenario that when I add a new payment and if for any reason I realize 1h later something was wrong, I could still change it. Now it was just immediately gone 😃

It was one transfer for now, but I guess it will stay that way. Of note, it was a transfer to another bank. Transfers between Yuh users themselves have been instantly already before afaik.
 
Lelouch said:
But from what I've read (https://insideparadeplatz.ch/2024/08/20/ready-steady-instant-posse/) banks only have to be able to receive the funds instantly, they don't have to send it instantly, only a few couple of banks offer that at the moment. Am I understanding that right?
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Correct. They all have the feature for ongoing payments, but they each need to develop their implementation for the outgoing ones.
Lelouch said:
Curious to see what this will mean for Twint down the line.
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That's a good point. If this new feature is picked up by all banks and gets common, it may take a hit at TWINT. We will have to wait and see :)
Michael said:
Yuh seems to have this implemented for free. You also can't select any option, it just goes through immediately.
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It's good that they implemented it for free. But they should communicate because as you said, it's a breaking change!
 
From Neon, my IBKR transfers always arrived within a few hours, much faster than when I did them from Migros Bank.

But it is great if neobanks are pushing this feature forward. It should be the norm, not an option.
 
Max said:
I tried to make a transfer from Neon to WIR on Friday. It was ordinarily scheduled for Monday.
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I guess Neon also has to opt for it on their end. Neon is using HBL, but it does not mean that Neon has the same features as HBL itself, especially since other banks are using HBL as well.
 
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Baptiste Wicht said:
I guess Neon also has to opt for it on their end. Neon is using HBL, but it does not mean that Neon has the same features as HBL itself, especially since other banks are using HBL as well.
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yeah, this is true, now Neon can do instant transfer to supporting banks, however Coop Finance still cannot do instant, both are using HBL.
 
Mindis said:
yeah, this is true, now Neon can do instant transfer to supporting banks, however Coop Finance still cannot do instant, both are using HBL.
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I don't think we can yet with Neon. This will likely come soon, but at this point, I don't think we can use this feature.
 
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