BANKING CIRCLE CHOOSES SIA TO LAUNCH INSTANT PAYMENTS SERVICE IN EUROPE

Thanks to the network infrastructure SIAnet, the new bank headquartered in Luxembourg allows European financial institutions and corporates to transfer money in real time accessing Eurosystem’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement service Banking Circle, the Payments Bank for the new economy, has selected SIA, a leading European hi-tech company in payment services and infrastructures, controlled by CDP Equity, to launch its new instant payments service in Europe connecting totheTARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) service of the Eurosystem. Thanks to SIAnet, the ultra-fast fiber optic network infrastructure, Banking Circleenables European financial institutions and corporates to execute instant payments in less than 10 seconds with a maximum amount currently set at 100,000 euros per individual transaction, 24/7, all year long, in line with the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme of the European Payments Council (EPC). The partnership with SIA also allows Banking Circle customers to benefit from the concession granted by the European Central Bank to SIA and Colt as Network Service Providers for ESMIG (Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway). Beyond TIPS, SIAnet enables all the key organizations in the European financial system to access also the platform for the settlement of large-value payments TARGET2, the securities settlement platform TARGET2-Securities (T2S), the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS), and possibly other new services and applications. The high-speed, secure and low-latency network infrastructure SIAnet is specially designed to meet the specific requirements of instant payments in terms of security, reliability and performance and it represents a single access channel to the main national and international payment platforms, alsoincluding EBA Clearing’s pan-European real-time payment system RT1.