How PTSB Delivered Real-Time Payments

Situation

Raising the Bar for Instant Payments in Europe

Permanent TSB (PTSB), one of Ireland’s major retail banks, faced the critical challenge of aligning with the EU SEPA Instant Payments mandate, which requires payments to be processed within 10 seconds, available 24/7, and fully compliant with European regulatory frameworks.

To achieve this at scale, PTSB partnered with Eastnets to deploy a real-time payments and screening architecture built for high availability, resilience, and regulatory precision.
Powered by SafeWatch Screening V5, the solution enables secure instant payments across multiple environments — without compromising speed, accuracy, or compliance.

Task

The Challenge – 10 Seconds or Less, No Room for Error

Meeting the SEPA Instant Payments mandate required a real-time platform capable of handling high volumes of transactions across two geographically dispersed data centres, each hosting multiple environments (BAU, SIT, Pre-Production, and Production).

PTSB needed to overcome several mission-critical challenges:

• Consistently meeting the 10-second end-to-end SLA for instant payments

• Ensuring real-time compliance screening aligned with FATF16 and ISO 20022 requirements

• Managing complex workflows across interconnected systems and multi-vendor teams

• Building an architecture with built-in redundancy, failover, and scalability

• Coordinating across internal teams and third-party infrastructures, many outside PTSB's control

Success required a powerful, intelligent architecture capable of supporting instant payments at scale — without sacrificing reliability or regulatory rigor.