EU IPR Decoded: Instant Payments Reporting and Deadlines for PSPs

Key Takeaways

• IPR introduces standardised, annual reporting to prove access, pricing equality, and safeguards for instant payments.
• First harmonised reports are due 9 April 2026, then annually, covering adoption, availability, fraud, and screening metrics.
• Compliance spans tech, process, and policy: PSPs must evidence how they meet obligations, not just that they do.

What is the EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) and Reporting Obligations?

IPR is the EU legislative push to make instant euro credit transfers the default and mandate 24/7 availability, pricing parity, verification-of-payee, and streamlined sanctions screening.

It also establishes supervisory visibility through instant payments reporting so national authorities can track adoption, uptime, fraud controls, and compliance with affordability and safety requirements across PSPs.

Related reading from the ezbob library: Regulatory compliance in digital banking and our platform capabilities that help operationalise reporting.

Key Metrics required in Instant Payment Reports

While each national competent authority (NCA) will provide exact templates, a common core will exist that demonstrates a compliant instant payment reports posture to include:

• Adoption and Volumes: Share of Instant vs Traditional transfers; sent and received transactions by segment by count and value.
• Availability: Percentage of 24/7/365 uptime (with expectation of >99.9%), maintenance windows, and queue times; SLA breaches and root cause investigations.
• Pricing and Parity: Fee structures provided, showing equality with non-instant transfers and the expectation that non-instant transfers will be of lower cost.
• Verification of Payee (VoP): request and response rates and response times, count of mismatches, user acknowledgements, and investigations of failed cases.
• Sanctions and AML (as part of CDD): daily screening coverage, with false positives and turnaround times.
• Fraud and Disputes: detection rates, losses prevented, reimbursement outcomes, recovery rates.
• Customer Experience: step-up challenges, failure reasons, and re-try success rates.

These data points will form the backbone of each instant payment report and let NCAs compare outcomes across institutions and act where required.

Technical and Operational Challenges in Complying with IPR Reporting

Reporting is only as good as the data and technical infrastructure beneath it, and PSPs must unify logs from payment rails, screening tools, fraud platforms, and core banking, then reconcile them into a single schema.

Key hurdles are expected to include event deduplication, back-filling historic data, anti-tamper storage, and lineage for each metric and governance matters too: assignment of ownership, automated controls, and maintenance of documentation for audits is important too – not only for NCAs but for the internal three line of defences model.

What Happens if PSPs Fail to Meet Reporting Standards?

Expect supervisory follow-ups, remediation plans, and, where breaches persist, administrative measures or fines.

Reputational risk is non-trivial: outages, non-parity pricing, or VoP gaps will surface through reports.

Strong evidence and proactive communication with NCAs mitigate enforcement risk, and embedding controls also reduces operational costs versus firefighting post-incident.

For a broader ecosystem context, see the ezbob guides to embedded payments and split payments vs POS lending.

IPR Timeline: What and When

How to Build an Automation-First Reporting Stack

• Event Capture at Source: instrument the payment engine, VoP, sanctions and fraud tools
• Governed data lake: partitioned by PSP, product, and date; enforce retention and PII rules.
• Auditable transformations: declarative pipelines (e.g., SQL/DBT) with tests and lineage.
• XBRL/CSV exports: generate regulator-ready packs with versioning and format checks.
• Dashboards for self-serve: meaning that business and compliance can inspect trends and spot issues early.

FAQ

How does Instant Payments Reporting differ from SEPA Instant Credit Transfer reporting?
Classic SCT Inst scheme reporting focuses on operational metrics to the scheme operator. The IPR extends this into a regulatory obligation to NCAs, emphasising equality of charges, 24/7 availability, verification-of-payee usage, sanctions screening cadence, and fraud outcomes. It’s broader in scope, standardised across the EU, and explicitly linked to supervisory oversight and enforcement.

What technology solutions are available to automate instant payment report generation?
Successful PSPs combine an event-driven data lake with policy-as-code and template exports. In practical terms, this means streaming events from rails and controls, orchestrating transforms, and emitting regulator packs on a schedule. Vendors can help with VoP, sanctions, and fraud telemetry, while workflow platforms (like ours) generate and validate the pack, log attestations, and push to the NCA portal automatically.