No, they haven't. "Instant Payments"/"Instant Credit Transfers" are specifically transfers completed in seconds. Banks usually charge more for this service than for regular transfers, which complete on the next business day.
IIRC, in Europe, instant transfers were introduced around 2018.
The EU recently mandated instant SEPA transfers be free. UPI (India) and PIX (Brazil) have similarly very low cost instant transfers. There are ~54 instant payment systems globally as of this comment. https://fastpayments.worldbank.org/ looks like it'll eventually track this, but is sparse at the moment. https://www.pymnts.com/tracker/real-time-payments-world-map-... has more info if you're willing to register, which is annoying.
You're just pushing iso 20022 messages around for most of these systems to transfer value.
> The EU recently mandated instant SEPA transfers be free
Small nitpick: The EU mandated that instant SEPA should cost no more than regular (slow) SEPA. We all expect this to be zero, since regular SEPA is currently free under almost all conditions, but: zero isn't the law.
> Danes have been making use of instant account-to-account transfers since the launch of Express Clearing (‘Straksclearing’) in 2014. Today, the mobile payment app MobilePay is used by almost everyone for instant peer-to-peer transfers. Traditional payment types such as direct debits are still widely used, however. Having been around for several decades, the direct debit schemes 'Betalingsservice' and 'Leverandørservice' are used by consumers and businesses respectively.
> All retail bank payments in Denmark are settled in the Kronos2 system, owned by the country's central bank, Danmarks Nationalbank, and cleared in one of three systems: Sum Clearing (‘Sumclearing’), Intraday Clearing (‘Intradagclearing’), and Express Clearing (‘Straksclearing’). These three systems dictate the settlement capabilities of the main schemes and payment methods available in Denmark.
The term of art is an alias or proxy identifier, and you specify it in your banking app (which should have strong identity controls around it; also, a confirmation email or SMS OTP is sent). At least with Zelle, when you add a new contact to make instant payments from an email address or phone number, the app will surface the first name of the deposit account owner so you can confirm the person you're sending funds to is who you intend to send funds to. Passing around long account numbers for funds transfers is poor UX. Consider Venmo is a photo of someone and their Venmo handle, similar with TransferWise.
