Cash flow is an important thing for the e-commerce industry, specifically. Not revenue, not margin – cash flow. The distinction matters because you can run a genuinely profitable online store and still find yourself unable to restock fast-selling stock-keeping units, fund ad campaigns for the sales funnel, or pay a supplier on time.
It is because payment infrastructure really matters.
Instant bank payments completely change e-commerce cash flow. If you go and read forums and expert opinions on the matter, you will see a consensus for instant payouts – it feels so much more advanced compared to old banking.
Instant bank payments provide a user-friendly experience, while teams stop planning around delays, because finance becomes real-time, not batch-based.
The bottleneck of traditional e-commerce settlements
Standard card processing involves a chain of intermediaries: the customer’s issuing bank, the card network, the acquiring bank, and the payment processor – each adding time, and often cost, before funds reach a merchant’s account.
This is a legacy payment design. However, at least in Europe, SEPA Instant Transfers and Open Banking payments are now stronger alternatives to traditional card payments. All thanks to SEPA Instant Transfers adoption accelerating under EU regulation from 2025 onward.
Beyond the settlement timeline itself, card payments carry a structural fraud liability that compounds the problem. Chargebacks are a big problem for the industry.
Here are the statistics from Mastercard: While merchants identify around 45% of their chargebacks as fraudulent, overall chargebacks are set to increase by 24% to 324 million by 2028.
SEPA Instant Transfers and Open Banking payments generally do not work through a card-style chargeback model and are not automatically reversible once settled, which makes it a huge deal for e-commerce cash flow.
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What are instant merchant settlements?
Instant merchant settlements are exactly what the phrase suggests: the funds from a completed customer transaction are made available in the merchant’s business account almost immediately or within seconds, depending on the payment rail and provider, rather than at the end of a batch processing cycle, which can take 1 to 3 days.
SEPA Instant payments, for example, are designed to be processed within seconds. Such transactions are enabled by account-to-account (A2A) payments, including Open Banking payments and instant bank payment systems like SEPA Instant, Faster Payments, etc.
Here’s how Open Banking transactions work: your customer clicks “Pay by Bank”. An Open Banking provider uses a secure API to connect to your bank app. It can initiate the payment and pre-fill the payment details, ask for the customer’s bank authentication approval, then, using the payment system available for that transfer, such as SEPA Instant for eligible euro payments, transfer the money.
The operational difference is substantial. Revenue is no longer a lagging indicator that can disrupt your e-commerce cash flow.
Open Banking payments: the engine behind instant settlements
True instant merchant settlements generally aren’t possible on standard traditional card acquiring rails. They require a different architecture entirely: account-to-account (A2A) payments.
Card payments route funds through multiple intermediaries before settlement. Meanwhile, Open Banking connects the customer’s bank to the merchant’s payment flow through secure APIs. There is no card network in the middle, no card acquiring batch processing overnight. When a customer initiates payment via Pay by Bank (usually powered by Open Banking), the transaction is authenticated at the bank level. It means that money moves via the relevant payment rail, often settling in seconds when instant payment systems are available.
A2A payments eliminate the card-style chargeback mechanism. Since the payment is a customer-initiated push transaction – not a card charge that can be disputed with an issuer – the chargeback exposure that costs the industry billions annually simply doesn’t apply in the same way, although refunds, recalls, or fraud-related claims may still exist depending on the payment rail and provider.
3 ways instant bank payments drive e-commerce growth
Uninterrupted inventory management and supply chain agility
Settlement delays create a gap between when a product sells and when a merchant can afford to replace it. In practice, this means that during high-demand periods – a product going viral, a seasonal spike, a successful campaign – the businesses most constrained are often those performing best on paper.
Instant bank payments can help close that gap. When settlement is near-immediate or much faster, inventory decisions can be made in real time, based on confirmed incoming funds rather than projected clearing dates.
Scaling ad spend in real-time
Paid acquisition is not a monthly budgeting exercise. Performance marketing on Meta or Google Ads operates on a daily or even hourly feedback loop – campaigns are adjusted, scaled, or cut based on live ROAS data. The merchants who can reinvest profits fastest are those that capture disproportionate growth during high-performing windows.
With instant merchant settlements, daily revenue can be redeployed the same day it’s earned, depending on the provider’s settlement setup.
This is big for social media-based businesses, where acquisition is a primary growth lever. It compresses the feedback loop in a way that materially affects e-commerce growth outcomes – particularly in competitive categories where the margin between a well-funded campaign and an underfunded one shows up directly in customer acquisition costs.
Better supplier and vendor relationships
Fast access to funds can also improve relationships with suppliers. When a merchant pays on time, suppliers are more likely to offer better terms, prioritize their orders, or provide more flexible pricing. If early-payment discounts are available, having the money ready makes it easier to use them.
Instant merchant settlements help with that because the money reaches the business account faster. It is not a loan or extra credit – it is faster access to the revenue the merchant has already earned. This can make it easier to pay suppliers earlier, negotiate better terms, and keep the supply chain running more smoothly.
Take control of your cash flow with Genome’s instant payouts
Our instant bank payments solution is Open Banking-powered and built specifically around this infrastructure. Using SEPA Instant Transfers, funds paid by customers via the Pay by Bank checkout option are processed within seconds.
Revenue flows directly from checkout to an operational balance, immediately available for inventory orders, supplier payments, or ad spend.
And, if for some reason, SEPA Instant Transfers are not available, SEPA Credit Transfers are used for this purpose, without disrupting your operations. SEPA Credit Transfers usually take 4 hours to process.
In addition to account-to-account (A2A) payments, our team also develops tools for future card payment processing. Using it, our merchant will be able to accept payments from around the world, as long as customers use Mastercard and Visa cards.
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Conclusion
The T+2 settlement cycle was designed for a different era of commerce. That is why it is called this: transaction date plus 2 days. In a market where e-commerce growth is measured in daily decisions – inventory restocks, campaign adjustments, supplier negotiations – operating on a two-or-three-day cash delay is an avoidable structural disadvantage.
Open Banking payments, A2A payments, and SEPA Instant Transfers have made instant or near-instant settlement practically achievable for many merchants willing to upgrade their payment infrastructure.
For EU-based merchants, instant and near-instant payments are becoming a stronger market expectation. In other parts of the world, instant payment and settlement options are also being adopted faster because of demand: faster reinvestment cycles, stronger supplier terms, and operational confidence to act on opportunities as they emerge rather than wait until the settlement window closes.
Technology exists. The infrastructure is live. The question is whether your payment setup is keeping pace with the rest of your business.
Choose Genome’s Instant Bank Payments solution: open a business wallet and merchant account and unlock instant payouts. Experience what it means to have your revenue available faster, when it matters most.
