At La Banque Postale, instant transfers have been free since 1 January 2022. They are now offered by default for payments of less than 1,000 euros.
It is a first among the major French banking brands. La Banque Postale (LBP) announces that it will generalize, from May 2022, the use of instant transfer for private money exchanges up to 1000 euros, and professionals and companies up to 7700euros. Instant transfers which, since the beginning of 2022, are no longer invoiced by the banking subsidiary of the La Poste group, whereas they previously cost 0.70 euro each.
This is good news for the large-scale adoption of instant transferswhich allows you to transfer money between 2 bank accounts, throughout Europe (1), in less than 10 seconds, including weekends and public holidays, compared to 24 48 hours for the traditional SEPA transfer. La Banque Postale claims, in fact, 20 million customers, of which about half are private individuals. However, 90% of the transfers of the latter are less than 1000 euros, and therefore affected by the measure. Result: the volume of instant payments recorded by LBP should explode in the coming months. They now represent only 3% of individual transfers.
La Banque Postale will also be able to set an example for its French competitors. Contrary to what is happening in other countries, notably in the Netherlands where it is dominant, instant transfers, although full of promises of new services for users, are still very underdeveloped. According to the latest figures available from the Banque de France, in the first half of 2021, it represented only 2.6% of all transfers.
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The pricing policy of French banks is largely responsible for this delay. According to our statement, the average price of an instant transfer is 0.94 euro piece and keeps increasing. Only about twenty banks, out of the 131 whose prices we follow, offer it free of charge. And they are even rarer to offer it by default, replacing the traditional SEPA transfer. This is the case for only a handful of online banks, including Fortuneo and Boursorama Banque.
(1) Member States of the European Union + Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, United Kingdom, San Marino, Switzerland and Vatican.