SEPA Instant payments will allow personal and business customers to make a euro payment within ten seconds, 24 hours a day. In tandem with this, Verification of Payee (VoP) will also be introduced for both SEPA Instant and standard SEPA payments. The services are being introduced as part of the EU's Instant Payments Regulation and will come into effect from 9 October 2025.

While the benefits of faster transactions and enhanced security are obvious, there may be some teething problems in the initial stages. Uneven rollout across Irish banks may cause short-term confusion or fragmented service, and VoP does not entirely eliminate scams or social-engineering risks. To find out more about this I caught up with Donal McGuinness, CEO of Prommt who was a guest on the podcast last year.

Donal talks about his background, faster payments, and older demographics.

More about Donal McGuiness

Serial entrepreneur Donal McGuinness is CEO of Prommt. He studied Computer Science at DCU and Telecommunications Engineering at DIT and spent the early years of his career in the telecommunications industry. His experience in mobile payments dates to 1999 when he founded his first mobile payments company, ItsMobile. Donal was also a Non-Executive Director of the Irish Internet Association from 2009 to 2011 and ran a movie distribution business from 2002 to 2020.

In 2016 Donal joined a silicon valley startup in the identity verification space called Danal inc, where he set up and grew the global business outside of the USA as General Manager of EMEA until 2019 when the business was acquired by Boku Inc for $112 million USD. Donal joined Prommt as CEO in 2019. He is an innovator and is passionate about payment innovation.

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