Instant Transfers
International payments in seconds are now a reality with BBVA Directa
July 22 2026
International payments have long been plagued by complex processes, multiple intermediaries, cut-off times and waiting times that last hours or even days. While companies and citizens can send money instantly in the SEPA area, thanks to instant payments, translating this experience onto the international stage has proved a major challenge for the financial industry.
But that is all about to change.
The challenge for international statements is no longer just to shorten the time for a transfer to reach its payee. The real aim is to deliver the same experience as instant payments in Europe: 24/7 year-round availability, speed, transparency and certainty about the status of each transaction.
Making this happen has required cross-sector standards, greater interoperability between infrastructures and close collaboration between the various actors in the payments ecosystem.
Spain is playing a pioneering role here. It is steadily building the capacity to take the instant payment experience onto the international stage. In May 2024, Iberpay became the first European payment system to process One-Leg-Out (OLO) transactions using the European Payments Council (EPC) OCT Inst scheme. Following this breakthrough, the bulk of Spain's financial community signed up to the scheme by November that year, making Spain the first European market ready to run large-scale international payments.
This was not just a milestone for the Spanish payments system, but the starting point for a new phase in international payments. As Juan Luis Encinas, Iberpay CEO said: “Now that we have consolidated instant payments in Europe, the natural next step is to extend the same experience internationally. To make this happen, we need a banking sector that is ready for the new service, networked and running on shared and interoperable infrastructures like Iberpay and Swift. Spain has led the way here, demonstrating that industry-wide collaboration can transform cross-border payments and offer customers a more immediate, transparent and traceable experience.”
This advance is in line with international priorities for payments. A roadmap laid out by the G20, FSB and BIS prioritises improving international payments to make them faster and more transparent, available and efficient. The OLO roll-out in Spain brings international payments a step closer to the domestic instant experience by allowing transfers from outside the SEPA zone to complete instantly in the Spanish market, with 24/7 availability and greater traceability.
With the national infrastructure now in place, BBVA Directa has emerged as a cutting-edge tangible service that demonstrates how the international instant payment experience can work in a real-world market.
BBVA Directa: eliminating barriers to international payments for their customers
For BBVA, the idea of BBVA Directa stemmed from a specific real-world need: to eliminate some of the restrictions that had long plagued international payments.
As Amit Hathiramani, Head of Network Management & Product Global Transaction Banking (CIB) at BBVA explains, many euro transfers from financial institutions outside Europe still depend on business hours that stop customers taking full advantage of the instant payments revolution.
In practice, this means a transaction can end up suspended until the next working day, even when both payer and payee were expecting instant payment.
In order to deliver this, BBVA has developed a service that links up its international payments network with Iberpay's instant payment infrastructure, which is now able to handle One-Leg-Out transfers in compliance with the European OCT Inst scheme.
“BBVA Directa was designed to eliminate these bottlenecks. The solution can instantly channel international payments coming into Spain, 24/7 and 365 days a year, by linking up the global payments infrastructure with the instant settlement capacity of the Spanish market,” says Amit Hathiramani.
The result brings the experience of international payments closer to the immediacy of domestic transfers with funds reaching the payee’s account in around 25 seconds.
Infrastructure and collaboration add up to innovation
The implications of the BBVA Directa launch are far-ranging. It is the fruit of collaboration between different actors in the payments ecosystem.
BBVA brings to the table its ability to connect to the world’s financial firms. Swift provides international traceability for transactions through its Swift GPI Tracker. Iberpay provides last-mile payment capacity across its OLO-ready euro instant payments infrastructure.
Together, they deliver a faster and more transparent and available experience that brings to the international market many of the qualities customers appreciate in SEPA instant payments.
For Iberpay, the real value of this development is to see its new technological capacities turned into real-world services that create tangible value for companies, institutions and citizens.
Much more than speed: a new way to manage multi-currency international payments
Although speed is one of the service's most obvious benefits, for BBVA the real change lies in its impact on the day-to-day operations of companies and financial firms.
“The benefits are much broader than just speed. When a company can collect or send an international payment in seconds, rather than hours or days, it significantly improves its ability to manage cash, streamline treasury and take real-time decisions” says Amit Hathiramani.
It opens the way to new use cases which were hard to achieve with traditional models.
An insurer can pay a customer as soon as the claim is decided. A digital platform can pay its users instantly, in- or outside working hours. An international customer can deal with urgent supplier payments, shift cash across subsidiaries or meet cash requirements over the weekend.
Instant availability of funds is no longer just a technical improvement. It is a real competitive advantage for companies, allowing better processes, optimising financial management and delivering a better customer experience.
As Amit Hathiramani explains, BBVA is seeing growing interest from financial firms looking to improve their international customers’ experience as well as from global companies, payment platforms, remittance services and organisations operating across different time zones.
A three-fold value proposition
For BBVA, the competitive advantage of BBVA Directa is not just that payments arrive faster.
Swift GPI Tracker makes the payment end-to-end traceable and Iberpay's infrastructure means last-mile processing of One-Leg-Out transfers takes less than a second. Result: an OLO transfer is processed within 10 to 25 seconds, depending on its country of origin.
All of which adds up to a much more reliable experience for participants, companies and individual customers.
"The main differentiating factor of BBVA Directa is that it delivers three things that were traditionally hard to achieve in international payments: instantaneity, availability and transparency" emphasizes Amit Hathiramani.
A model already showing results
In its first few months of operation, the new international payment model has seen a rise in uptake.
Statistics aside, early results demonstrate that the instant payment experience is now being successfully replicated in real-world international transfers.
Dawn of a new era
For BBVA, instant international payments are simultaneously a natural evolution of the market and a radical transformation in how companies and financial firms manage their money.
Amit Hathiramani says: “The option to move money immediately, 24/7 is changing the way companies manage their cash, run their treasury processes and operate internationally. Money is liberated from the tyranny of business hours and is there whenever it is needed.”
BBVA Directa is a service that meets real market needs, built on collaboration between financial firms, payment infrastructures and international standards. It paves the way for the next generation of international payments—faster, more transparent and ready to meet the needs of an increasingly connected economy.
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