OCT Inst Scheme Explained: Sending Instant Euro Beyond SEPA

ByRegReportingDesk

The EPC OCT Inst scheme has been live since 28 November 2023, and on 15 September 2026 the European Payments Council hosted its OCT Inst in Action webinar with payment service and infrastructure providers that were implementing or already offering OCT Inst-based services. If your firm uses the OCT Inst scheme for an international instant credit transfer, the OCT Inst rulebook governs the Euro Leg of that scheme transaction, including euro end-to-end cases where one financial institution is outside SEPA; adherence to OCT Inst remains voluntary.

The scheme is easy to misread, because its name suggests a full cross-border rail and it is not one. OCT Inst standardises the Euro Leg of an international instant transfer. The processing arrangements for the non-Euro Leg sit outside the scheme. The rulebook does not prescribe whether, how, where or by whom currency conversion is performed, but it does impose data and transparency requirements where conversion occurs.

This matters now for a practical reason. Regulation (EU) 2024/886 has already reached the general euro-area deadlines for PSPs other than payment institutions and electronic money institutions: receiving by 9 January 2025 and sending by 9 October 2025. Euro-area payment institutions and electronic money institutions have until 9 April 2027 for both. OCT Inst is the voluntary answer to those cases, and its adherence, its settlement plumbing, and its message standards are all moving at once.

Related reading: the EPC Instant Credit Transfer Scheme Selector, the EPC tool that tells you whether a given transaction belongs to OCT Inst or to SCT Inst.

The OCT Inst calendar that matters

OCT Inst does not carry a single go-live deadline the way the Instant Payments Regulation does, because adherence is voluntary. It does carry a cluster of dates that shape when a participant has to build, what version of the rulebook applies, and when message formats change. These are the ones worth pinning to a project plan.

  • 28 November 2023: the OCT Inst scheme went live, having been open for adherence from November 2023.
  • 8 April 2024: Regulation (EU) 2024/886, the Instant Payments Regulation, entered into force after publication in the Official Journal on 19 March 2024. This is the mandatory euro-instant regime that sits alongside, but separate from, OCT Inst.
  • 9 January 2025 and 9 October 2025: the general euro-area receive and send deadlines under Article 5a(8) of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 as amended. Payment institutions and electronic money institutions in euro-area Member States instead have until 9 April 2027 for both receiving and sending.
  • 5 October 2025: the 2025 OCT Inst rulebook took effect, an unusual October start chosen to align the scheme with the Instant Payments Regulation rather than the customary November release weekend.
  • 15 November 2026: this was the unstructured-address end date stated in the 2025 OCT Inst rulebook version 1.1, but the EPC Payment Scheme Management Board decided on 9 September 2026 to delay it. Unstructured addresses will remain supported beyond 15 November 2026; the EPC said it would set a new end date in October 2026 and update the relevant scheme documentation.
  • 9 January 2027 and 9 July 2027: the general receive and send deadlines for PSPs in Member States whose currency is not the euro. Payment institutions and electronic money institutions instead have 9 April 2027 for receiving and 9 July 2027 for sending. Article 5a(8) also contains a limited derogation until 9 June 2028 for sending instant euro from national-currency accounts in the circumstances specified there.

What the OCT Inst scheme actually standardises

The OCT Inst scheme covers the rules, practices, and standards needed to reach interoperability for the euro leg of an international instant credit transfer at inter-PSP level within SEPA. Read that definition slowly, because every qualifier in it is load-bearing. The scheme is about the euro leg. It operates at the inter-PSP level. It lives within SEPA. It does not attempt to govern the whole international chain.

An OCT Inst transfer has a Euro Leg and a non-Euro Leg. The Euro Leg is denominated in euro and is handled under the scheme. The non-Euro Leg may involve a financial institution outside the SEPA Schemes’ Geographical Scope, or an institution established or licensed within that scope that operates in the non-Euro Leg of the transaction. The processing and clearing or settlement arrangements for the non-Euro Leg sit outside the scheme. OCT Inst describes an account-to-account credit-transfer model and standardises the Euro Leg rather than the end-to-end international product.

This is where scoping goes wrong. Teams sometimes assume OCT Inst delivers a full cross-border instant service the moment they adhere, and then discover that reaching a beneficiary in a non-SEPA country still depends on the onward leg they have to build or buy separately. The scheme gives you a fast, predictable euro segment. It leaves the connection beyond SEPA to you.

Incoming and outgoing are two different builds

OCT Inst distinguishes the direction of travel, and the distinction is not cosmetic. An outgoing OCT Inst transaction starts in the Euro Leg at a Euro Leg-based Payer’s PSP and ends in the non-Euro Leg at a non-Euro Leg Payee’s FI. An incoming OCT Inst transaction starts in the non-Euro Leg and ends in the Euro Leg at a Euro Leg-based Payee’s PSP. A non-Euro Leg FI may operate outside the SEPA Schemes’ Geographical Scope, or may be established or licensed within that scope but operate in the non-Euro Leg of the transaction. The EPC publishes two separate sets of inter-PSP implementation guidelines, one for incoming transactions and one for outgoing transactions, because the message flows and the responsibilities differ at each end of the euro leg.

A firm that only wants to receive inbound remittances into euro accounts does not have the same build as a firm that wants to push euro out toward a partner in another region. Adhering to the scheme does not force you to support both directions from day one, but the implementation guidelines you follow, and the testing you run, depend on which direction you are enabling. Confusing the two guideline sets during analysis is a common way to under-scope a project.

The four euro-leg roles and the ten-second clock

Across incoming and outgoing OCT Inst flows, the rulebook defines four Euro Leg Participant roles: the Euro Leg-based Payer’s PSP, the Euro Leg Exit PSP, the Euro Leg Entry PSP, and the Euro Leg-based Payee’s PSP. They are not four PSPs that must all appear in one transaction. An incoming OCT Inst uses the Euro Leg Entry PSP and Euro Leg-based Payee’s PSP roles; an outgoing OCT Inst uses the Euro Leg-based Payer’s PSP and Euro Leg Exit PSP roles. Each required role must be performed by a scheme Participant, while intermediary PSPs may also be used in the Euro Leg.

Speed is measured against the Euro Leg, not the whole international journey. For an incoming OCT Inst, the target maximum execution time is ten seconds from the Euro Leg Entry PSP’s Euro Leg time stamp. For an outgoing OCT Inst, the target is also ten seconds, measured from the Euro Leg-based Payer’s PSP’s Euro Leg time stamp until it receives the applicable confirmation. These targets govern the Euro Leg; non-Euro Leg processing is outside them.

For teams used to the end-to-end promise of a domestic instant scheme, this is the point to internalise. When a customer asks why a cross-border payment took longer than ten seconds, the honest answer is that OCT Inst never promised a ten-second end-to-end transfer. It promised a fast euro leg.

Currency conversion, and who has to be transparent about it

OCT Inst is built to carry international transfers, so it accepts that money will often change currency somewhere along the way. Under the scheme, the payment accounts of the payer and of the payee may be in euro or in any other currency. The rulebook deliberately does not specify whether a currency conversion happens, how it happens, where in the OCT Inst chain it happens, or which party performs it.

What the rulebook does insist on is transparency. Where a conversion takes place, all the details about the initial credit transfer amount in the other currency, and about the conversion operation itself, must be made available in a fully transparent way to the payer and the payee concerned. For a compliance team, that turns an apparently technical FX question into a disclosure obligation baked into the scheme: you can arrange conversion where it makes commercial sense, provided the customer can see the original amount and the conversion applied to it. The scheme leaves the conversion mechanism open, while requiring the relevant amount, currency-conversion and charging information to be transparent to the payer and payee.

Voluntary scheme, mandatory regulation: keep them apart

The single most useful thing to understand about OCT Inst is that it is not the Instant Payments Regulation, and adhering to one does not discharge the other. The scheme is optional. PSPs that meet the eligibility criteria in section 5.4 of the OCT Inst rulebook may adhere; the regulation is binding law.

Regulation (EU) 2024/886 amended Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 so that PSPs within Article 5a(1) that offer sending and receiving credit transfers must also offer sending and receiving instant credit transfers in euro, subject to the staged Article 5a(8) deadlines. For euro-area PSPs on the general timetable, the deadlines were 9 January 2025 for receiving and 9 October 2025 for sending; euro-area payment institutions and electronic money institutions have until 9 April 2027 for both. In non-euro Member States, the general deadlines are 9 January 2027 and 9 July 2027, while payment institutions and electronic money institutions have 9 April 2027 and 9 July 2027 respectively. Article 5a(8) also contains a limited derogation until 9 June 2028. These statutory obligations are separate from OCT Inst; SCT Inst is the EPC scheme for SEPA instant credit transfers, while OCT Inst remains a separate EPC scheme. Our explainer on the SEPA Instant Payments Regulation sets out those obligations in detail.

OCT Inst covers the cases the regulation leaves untouched: a euro instant transfer where one end sits outside SEPA, or where one leg is in a currency other than euro. The EPC scheme selector makes the boundary explicit. SCT Inst cannot be used to send euro from an account at an institution outside SEPA to an account inside SEPA, or the reverse; in that scenario the OCT Inst scheme is the one to use. Treating OCT Inst adherence as a way to satisfy the Instant Payments Regulation, or assuming the regulation forces OCT Inst on anyone, is the mistake to avoid. They solve different problems.

The maximum amount lives in a binding supplement

OCT Inst sets a maximum amount per instruction, and it does so outside the main rulebook text. Section 2.4 of the OCT Inst rulebook refers to a separate document, EPC252-22, which fixes the maximum amount for instructions and forms a binding supplement to the rulebook. Keeping the amount in a supplement lets the EPC adjust it through its change process without reopening the whole rulebook.

For implementation, read the current EPC252-22 supplement rather than assume a figure carried over from another scheme. The EPC may revise the maximum amount outside the regular rulebook release cycle; section 2.4 also permits agreed higher amounts between individual Participants or communities of Participants, subject to the applicable SEPA Regulation limit, while outgoing arrangements may set lower limits. Configure validation against the current supplement and any applicable agreement.

Structured addresses and the 15 November 2026 switch

The 2025 OCT Inst rulebook version 1.1, published in October 2025, originally moved the unstructured-address end date from 22 November to 15 November 2026 and made no other business or operational rule changes compared with version 1.0. That timetable has since changed. On 9 September 2026 the EPC Payment Scheme Management Board decided to delay the end date and maintain support for unstructured addresses beyond 15 November 2026, with a new date to be set in October 2026 and the scheme documentation to be updated.

Structured and hybrid address formats remain supported. The EPC continues to encourage migration, preferably to fully structured addresses, but 15 November 2026 is no longer the operative cut-off for unstructured addresses. Our coverage of the EPC structured address migration traces how these dates have shifted, and the same discipline applies to OCT Inst.

Structured data is also the point where OCT Inst connects to the wider move to ISO 20022 messaging in cross-border payments, a shift we examine in the CPMI harmonised ISO 20022 data requirements. An OCT Inst euro leg carrying clean, structured party data is easier to reconcile with the onward international leg than one that does not.

Where OCT Inst is heading

Adoption is the theme the EPC keeps returning to, and the September 2026 webinar was part of that push. The first participants to join the scheme were Iberpay and Santander, and EBA CLEARING implemented its OCT Inst service in RT1 on 17 November 2024. On the central-bank side, TIPS is already live with cross-currency capability: the ECB states that a baseline capability based on OCT Inst was implemented in June 2025 and that the TIPS cross-currency settlement service has been available to all TIPS participants since October 2025. The service supports transfers involving euro, Swedish krona and Danish krone. The TIPS-India UPI interlink entered the realisation phase in November 2025; the ECB’s cross-border payments page separately shows Nexus and Swiss SIC Instant Payments in exploration.

The EPC’s 2026 SCT Inst rulebook consultation contains a change request evaluating whether OCT Inst adherence should become mandatory under certain conditions for certain SCT Inst participants, at least in the Euro Leg-based Payee’s PSP role. The change request outlines a number of possible approaches, or a combination of them, being considered. It remains a consulted proposal: the EPC states that the final decision is pending after consultation feedback and internal assessment. Until such a change is adopted into a future rulebook, OCT Inst remains optional.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does adhering to OCT Inst replace our correspondent banking or Swift arrangements for the non-euro leg?

No. OCT Inst standardises the euro leg of an international instant credit transfer at inter-PSP level within SEPA. The leg that reaches a payer or payee outside SEPA, and any onward routing in another currency, stays with whatever arrangement you use for that market. The scheme sits on top of your cross-border connectivity for the euro portion; it does not remove the need for it.

We are already compliant with the Instant Payments Regulation. Are we automatically OCT Inst participants?

No. Regulation (EU) 2024/886 imposes statutory instant-credit-transfer obligations on in-scope PSPs through Regulation (EU) No 260/2012; it does not make a PSP an OCT Inst participant or prescribe OCT Inst adherence. OCT Inst adherence is a separate, voluntary step, with its own rulebook, implementation guidelines and adherence process.

Can an OCT Inst payment be sent in a currency other than euro?

The payer’s and payee’s accounts may be in euro or in another currency, and international transfers under the scheme can involve a conversion. What the scheme standardises is the euro leg. Where a conversion occurs, the rulebook requires full transparency to the payer and payee about the original amount in the other currency and about the conversion itself, but it does not dictate who performs the conversion or where in the chain.

Both our payer and payee are inside SEPA. Should we use OCT Inst or SCT Inst?

SCT Inst. When both institutions are based in SEPA and the transfer is euro end to end, the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme applies. OCT Inst is for the cases where one end sits outside SEPA or one leg is in a non-euro currency. The EPC scheme selector walks through the currency and location parameters to confirm which scheme fits a given transaction.

Is there a maximum amount per OCT Inst instruction?

Yes. Section 2.4 points to binding supplement EPC252-22, which sets the published maximum amount and can be updated outside the regular rulebook release cycle. Section 2.4 also permits agreed higher amounts between individual Participants or communities of Participants, subject to the applicable SEPA Regulation limit, while outgoing arrangements may set lower limits. Check the current EPC252-22 version and any applicable agreement before configuring limits.

Which OCT Inst rulebook version is current, and what changed most recently?

The 2025 OCT Inst rulebook version 1.1 remains the latest published rulebook. It originally moved the unstructured-address end date to 15 November 2026, but the EPC Payment Scheme Management Board decided on 9 September 2026 to delay that end date; a new date is due to be set in October 2026 and the scheme documentation is to be updated. Version 1.1 otherwise made no other business or operational rule changes compared with version 1.0.

Do all four euro-leg PSPs really need to be scheme participants?

The OCT Inst role used in a transaction must be performed by a scheme Participant. For an incoming transaction, the relevant Participant roles are the Euro Leg Entry PSP and the Euro Leg-based Payee’s PSP; for an outgoing transaction, they are the Euro Leg-based Payer’s PSP and the Euro Leg Exit PSP. The rulebook does not require all four roles to appear in a single transaction.

Key Takeaways

  • OCT Inst standardises the Euro Leg of an international instant credit transfer; non-Euro Leg processing and clearing or settlement arrangements sit outside the scheme. Currency conversion may occur at different points in the chain, including in the Euro Leg, and the rulebook imposes transparency and message-data requirements where conversion occurs.
  • The scheme is voluntary and participation is available to PSPs meeting the rulebook’s eligibility criteria; it is separate from the mandatory Instant Payments Regulation and adherence does not itself satisfy that regulation.
  • Regulation (EU) 2024/886 uses different Article 5a(8) dates by PSP type and Member-State currency: the 9 January and 9 October 2025 euro-area dates do not apply to payment institutions or electronic money institutions, which have 9 April 2027; non-euro Member States also have later dates and a limited derogation through 9 June 2028.
  • For an incoming OCT Inst, the Euro Leg Entry PSP and Euro Leg-based Payee’s PSP roles must be performed by Participants; for an outgoing OCT Inst, the Euro Leg-based Payer’s PSP and Euro Leg Exit PSP roles must be performed by Participants. Both directions have a target Euro Leg maximum execution time of ten seconds from the applicable Euro Leg time stamp.
  • Incoming and outgoing transactions use separate inter-PSP implementation guidelines; scope each direction you intend to support.
  • EPC252-22 sets the published maximum amount referenced in section 2.4 and can be revised outside the regular rulebook cycle. Section 2.4 also permits agreed higher amounts between individual Participants or communities of Participants, subject to the applicable SEPA Regulation limit, while outgoing arrangements may set lower limits; check the current supplement and applicable agreements before configuring validation limits.
  • The 2025 rulebook version 1.1 originally moved the unstructured-address end date to 15 November 2026, but the EPC delayed that cut-off on 9 September 2026; a new end date is due to be set in October 2026.
  • Separate live capability from roadmap: TIPS cross-currency settlement has been available since October 2025; the still-open EPC item is the 2026 change request concerning possible mandatory OCT Inst adherence for certain SCT Inst participants.

Sources and References

Before your next cross-border euro instruction

The question to settle inside your firm is narrow: for the international instant flows you already handle, is the Euro Leg running under OCT Inst, or under another arrangement. If you are building toward the scheme, confirm that each required OCT Inst Euro Leg role is performed by a scheme Participant, decide whether you are enabling incoming, outgoing, or both, and read the current EPC252-22 supplement before setting limits. Continue the structured or hybrid address migration, but track the EPC’s October 2026 update for the revised end date for unstructured addresses rather than treating 15 November 2026 as the cut-off.

Disclaimer: The information on RegReportingDesk.com is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, regulatory, tax, or compliance advice. Always consult your compliance officer, legal counsel, or the relevant supervisory authority for guidance specific to your institution.

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