Instant payments - useful?

Does your bank offer instant payments? If yes, what is the price?
Do you use it or plan to use it? If yes, in which use cases?

My feedback:
Raiffeisen offers 12 free instant payments a year, then 2.-.
I use it to top my neon card. However, even if the payment takes less than 1 minutes to appear on the neon bank account. It takes up to 30min to be able to use it with the credit card. Neon has confirmed that it’s not optimal and are working on a solution to shorten the delay.

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No, I do not use it, yet.
Is probably nice for really urgent payments.

UBS has instant payments for CHF 5, never used it so far though. I guess I would use it in a real emergency.

TWINT is sort of an instant payment too, though, under circumstances. Must admit I really like TWINT!

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I actually don’t use it. I had no use case since today where instant payment was necessary.

I use Twint or credit card if “urgent”.

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Recently sent money from Yuh to ZKB and it was gone from my account immediately. (Assume it arrived there as well instantly)
There were no costs or options to choose for instant payment.

But that’s n=1, no other (positive or negative) experiences.

Other than buying a mansion over the weekend , I can’t think of any real use case for instant payments :slight_smile:

For urgent payments UBS 5 CHF would work I think

I’m using it for moving money around banks and paying bills with different accounts in one smooth session. I’m with Raiffeisen too for the time being so the 12 free instances cover my once a month ritual. It’s really not required and not a feature I’d request, but it’s there so I’m making some use of it.

Does it also work for payments outside EU? If yes, that would be a usecase for me personally. In switzerland twint works pretty good and is probably more convenient most of the time.

Instant Payment in switzerland could make sense for a business. Compared to twint you could avoid the fee payed by the seller (as a business, not as private person)

Outside of EU you’re in the old school wire transfer mode, so no.

Here we’re talking about domestic CHF wires.

I don’t think my bank(s) offer what you describe. Never missed this feature though up till now.

I regularly still use this old-fashioned paper money for instant payments though, and extremely happy with its acceptance, cost and efficiency.

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I recently tried neon to neon. It took 3 minutes, not at all instant.

Same here.

My prediction (I could be completely wrong) is that within the coming years instant bank transfers will become widely used as a payment method. The reason is that the costs are massively lower than accepting credit cards, debit cards, or Twint.

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Is it just me, or have Raiffeisen account processors also lost the instant payment option? It was available at launch this year but seems to have disappeared recently.

I wanted to use this feature for the first time to transfer part of my 13th salary to IBKR, but I was surprised to find the option was no longer available.

Isn’t TWINT kind of Instant direct transfer peer to peer?

Buying a used car.

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The same in my account, the feature is missing.

It seems to me that Twint secures and validates the transaction, but the actual transfer of funds occurs with a delay. I don’t understand why Twint would allow an instant transfer of funds when the banks’ payment processor does not.

It also seems that this feature has been disabled in this case… I wonder if it’s related to the end of the year or the failure of their new app launch.

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I wanted to use the instant payment facility to send CHF to my wise account, this Saturday. Raiffeisen sent it “immediately” (it always takes Raiffeisen minutes to execute) but so far JP Morgan (the wise chf bank in Zurich) has not transferred the money to wise.
Would be useful if banks would also work on the weekend.

Not all bank entities are mandated yet to instant-receive the payment, that’s only for the larger banks. For all banks, the deadline for mandatory instant-receive is soemtimes 2026, if I recall correctly. JPM might fall into the later category.

Second to consider is the link JPM ↔ Wise, there might be a regular poll interval for new payments instead of instant loop. That said, I saw SEPA transfer almost instantly (1-2min) credited in EUR countries.

Instant payments cant come soon enough, SIX and regulations are dragging its feet and likely doing this to not fall further behind EU (hah, at least one thing where its better, rarity). The typical 5Fr/instant-send charge these days is just a way to syphon some money off clients while they can.

From my experience, if a SEPA payment takes 1-2 minutes then I would be wondering why it was so unusually slow :grinning: Usually takes only a few seconds.

Instant payments can’t come soon enough for me. I’m into photography and constantly buying and trying new equipment which I would like resell later. Twint has a 1,000 CHF per month receiving limit, Ricardo has 10%+ selling fees, so Twint up to 1,000 CHF or cash on collection (which I hate) is the only real option for selling stuff right now. Instant payment would solve this issue… instantly :wink: