Instant payments leave no overnight window for exceptions
Most payment operations were designed around a batch, and the batch gave everyone a night to think. Since 9 January, payment service providers in the euro area have had to be able to receive instant credit transfers, and by 9 October 2025 they must be able to send them and offer Verification of Payee.
Providers connected to Aani, the UAE instant payment platform run by Al Etihad Payments, have been living with this since it launched in October 2023. For many European teams it is new. In our view the technical connection is the easier half of the change. The harder half is deciding who handles an exception that arrives at 2am on a Sunday, and what that person is allowed to do about it.
What used to wait until morning
Think about where exceptions sat in a batch world. An inbound payment that could not be applied, because the account was closed or blocked or the name did not match, went into a queue overnight, and someone decided in the morning whether to credit, hold or return it. An outbound payment that tripped a fraud rule sat until an analyst reviewed it after the morning stand-up. Customers mostly did not notice, because nobody expected the money before the next business day.
With instant payments the customer is watching. They pressed send expecting the money to arrive in seconds, and the app says pending. The person they are paying may be on the phone asking where it is. Every exception queue that used to be worked the next morning now has a customer waiting on it, and nights and weekends are when your team is thinnest.
Fraud review is where this bites hardest. A rule that pauses a payment for manual review assumes someone is there to do the review. If nobody is, the pause becomes a hold of several hours, and for the customer that feels like a failed payment with worse communication. There are two workable answers. You can staff the review so that a person looks within minutes at any hour, or you can change the rules so the system decides on its own out of hours, releasing below a threshold and rejecting above it, with the customer told straight away and able to try again later. The first costs salaries and rota fatigue. The second costs some good payments rejected and some bad ones let through. A manual review step with nobody behind it is the one option that does not work.
A rule that holds a payment for manual review is a promise that someone will look at it, and at 2am that promise needs a name next to it.
Customer contact follows the same logic. If support closes at 22:00 and payments run all night, the in-app status and any automated replies need to say what is happening and when a person will pick it up. Customers cope better with a stated wait than with silence. Scam reports need the most thought: a customer who realizes at midnight that they have just paid a fraudster wants to tell someone at once, and any chance of recovering the money depends on how quickly the receiving bank hears about it.
Who decides at 2am
Round-the-clock cover can be lighter than a full night shift, since volumes in the small hours are usually low. What it needs is a named person on call with authority to decide, and alerts that carry enough detail to act on from a laptop at home. Test the alerting before you rely on it. Send a test page on a Saturday night and see how long acknowledgment takes, whether the person can open the case from where they are, and whether the alert tells them what to do. Alerts that fire on every held payment tend to get muted, so route the ones that need a human decision to the rota and send the rest to a morning report.
Decision rights are easy to leave vague. Write down, with amounts, what the on-call person can do alone: release a held payment up to a set value, return an inbound payment that cannot be applied, place a temporary block on an account where fraud is suspected. Then write down what needs a second person, and who that is at night. Say your on-call analyst can release held payments up to 5,000 euros, and above that calls the duty manager, who has to answer within fifteen minutes. The numbers are illustrative. What matters is that the analyst does not have to guess, or wake the head of payments to find out whether they are allowed to act.
Someone also needs the authority to change the service itself. If a fraud pattern appears on a Saturday night, you may need to lower instant payment limits or pause sending for a group of customers. That call has commercial and regulatory consequences, and 2am is a bad time to be thinking about it for the first time. Write it into a runbook with the trigger, the people who can make the call and the steps to carry it out. The same goes for an outage at night, when the questions about manual fallback that the July outage raised come up with less time to answer them.
Liquidity used to wait for Monday too. If instant payments settle from a prefunded account, someone has to watch that balance over a weekend or a long holiday and be able to top it up. An account that runs low at 1am on a Saturday stops outgoing payments until somebody notices.
The October deadline gives euro-area providers almost nine months before sending and Verification of Payee arrive, and Verification of Payee will bring questions of its own from customers whose payee names do not match. That is time to run the on-call model for a few weekends on inbound payments alone, find where it breaks and fix it before outbound volume arrives.
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