Introduction
SEPA Instant has become a core payment rail for Deutsche Bank's corporate clients, especially since the EU Instant Payments Regulation made instant euro transfers mandatory and priced no higher than standard transfers. In this scenario, the rejection rate for SEPA Instant payments sent by Deutsche Bank's corporate clients rose from 0.8% to 2.6% over ten days. Each failure means a supplier or employee is not paid, a treasurer must investigate, and a client may move urgent payments to another bank. I'll clarify the problem, rule out external factors, understand the journey, break down the metric, form and test hypotheses, and propose a resolution.
For payment failures, separate the problem into layers: client instruction quality, bank-side validation and screening, scheme and network, and beneficiary bank. Each layer leaves different evidence in the data.
Step 1
Clarifying Questions (3 minutes)
- Hypothetical answer: Any instant payment that does not settle and returns a negative status, whether rejected by Deutsche Bank before sending or by the scheme or beneficiary bank.
- Impact: We must split pre-send and post-send rejections.
- Hypothetical answer: Sudden; it jumped on a specific Monday and stayed high.
- Impact: Suggests a release, configuration change or external event rather than gradual behaviour shifts.
- Hypothetical answer: Host-to-host file channels and APIs both show increases; the corporate portal less so.
- Impact: Points to processing logic rather than the portal interface.
- Hypothetical answer: Not yet known.
- Hypothetical answer: A weekend release updated payment validation, and in October 2025 the Verification of Payee (VoP) requirement started across the euro area, with ongoing tuning since.
- Impact: Two candidate internal and regulatory triggers.
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