Author: Gerlu de Bruin, Senior Product Manager at Brite Payments
The conversation around instant payments often focuses on the front end: speed, convenience, and payment finality. But for any modern business – from travel and trading to e-commerce and lending – the real test of a payment platform lies on the other side of the coin: the instant payout and refund.
In today’s ‘instant economy,’ where consumers expect real-time interactions 24/7, a slow payout or refund is not just an inconvenience; it’s a fundamental breakdown of trust. This is why we’ve engineered our instant payouts at Brite to be a reliable, robust, and always available option for our merchants.
The Technology Under the Hood: More Than Just ‘Fast’
When asked about the technology powering our instant payouts, I often highlight three core elements that move us beyond both competitors and simple bank transfers:
A Single, Robust API Endpoint: This is our foundation. We provide our merchants with a single API to initiate a payout, no frills, no fuss. In the back-end, we ensure that payouts are sent to the intended recipient by leveraging open banking licenses and secure APIs. Our merchants can “shoot and forget” while we take care of the complexities in the back-end.
Reliable Bank Integrations: We don’t just rely on one bank integration. We ensure that multiple instant bank integrations are available for payouts and refunds. This setup allows Brite to smartly route every transaction for speed, reliability, and efficiency; constantly seeking the most optimised path for the payout or refund. The optimisation happens completely behind the scenes, requiring zero technical effort from our merchants.
Local Scheme Integration: While SEPA INST covers much of Europe, non-Euro markets require deep, local expertise. Our strategy is to integrate directly with these instant rails through trusted partners, ensuring true instantness, regardless of the local currency.
This multi-layered approach may add some complexity for us to build, but the pluses far outweigh any negatives, meaning our merchants benefit from a seamless and reliable payouts infrastructure that is ready for whatever comes its way.
The Critical Benefits: Beyond the “Now”
The ultimate benefit for the consumer and the merchant is obvious: the payout is instant. But the underlying value that Brite delivers goes much deeper:
- Unwavering Reliability and Availability (24/7/365)
This is the paramount selling point. An “instant” service that is only available during banking hours or goes down periodically is useless. We offer this reliability through:
- Backup Integrations: We have fallback integration solutions available in all our major markets. Suppose a primary instant rail or bank integrator temporarily fails (a scenario we must always plan for). In that case, we can intelligently switch to a backup integration, ensuring payouts are always available to our merchants and remain instant or near-instant where technically possible.
- Always-On Promise: We sell 24/7, 365-day availability. Merchants must have this level of reliability, especially in verticals like trading or early wage access, where deposits and withdrawals happen around the clock.
- Superior Cost Efficiency
Account-to-account (A2A) payments and payouts are inherently more cost-efficient than traditional methods like card transactions. By bypassing intermediaries and going directly from bank to bank, we significantly lower transaction costs for our merchants. In this space, cost and instantness are the two core “tickets to the game” – if you don’t offer both, you simply cannot compete.
- Simplified Operations and Reconciliation
While instantness is customer-facing, our back office features streamline operations for the merchant:
- Feature Rich Back Office: Our Merchant Back Office serves as a merchant’s central command centre for day-to-day transaction processing and management. It empowers our merchants to handle features such as viewing detailed Payout and Refund transactions, internal transfers, and FX exchange. We are proud of our Merchant Back Office and continuously invest in this platform to deliver maximum value. Ask us about our latest enhancement: the Manual Payout feature, which enables you to make a direct Payout to a specified IBAN instantly.
- Automated Reconciliation: For us, reconciliation is a feature of an instant payout, not an afterthought. The transaction’s real-time nature simplifies the merchant’s cash flow management and accounting processes, ensuring funds are settled and accounted for immediately.
The Expectation Shift: The German Metric
The market is shifting rapidly, and nowhere is that clearer than in one of Europe’s most traditional markets, Germany. Data from our 2025 YouGov survey of German online consumers highlighted a 10% decrease in how long consumers expect a payout to take, with more demanding payouts in a minute or less. Moreover, this expectation is universal based on our survey data from across European markets in 2024.
Indeed, as part of Instant Payouts from Brite, we offer a Time2Money feature, which provides consumers with a clear timeline for when their funds will arrive and is becoming increasingly valuable.
Finally, the future of payouts is not just fast (that is a given); it is instead reliably, universally, and transparently instant. This is the standard Brite is built to uphold across a fragmented European landscape.
And as regulations mature, the need for payout providers who can deliver scale, reliability, and instantness in every market will only intensify.
Like what you hear about our Instant Payouts?
If you would like to learn more about Brite Instant Payouts, visit our Instant Payouts product page or get in touch directly, and one of our payments experts will happily guide you through what you need to know.
