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TARGET Services are the Eurosystem’s own settlement rails, operated by the ECB and the national central banks. The platform gives you access to both payment services as one managed offering:
  • T2 - the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system for high-value and urgent euro payments.
  • TIPS - the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement service, settling instant euro payments around the clock.
Both settle in central bank money with immediate finality, both use the same T2 ISO 20022 message family, and since 2025 licensed payment and e-money institutions can participate directly alongside banks. Inventi handles payment creation, connectivity, onboarding, T2 ISO 20022 message handling, status tracking, participant validations and more. In other words, you become the T2 direct participant, but do not run your own ESMIG technical connectivity.
Your TARGET accounts are opened with your national central bank - Bank of Lithuania or Latvijas Banka, for example - which becomes your account-holding central bank and runs the admission process. Inventi acts as your technical service provider in that setup; the contractual relationship for the accounts is between you and the central bank.

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Why TARGET Services

  • Settlement in central bank money - every payment settles individually and with immediate finality at the central bank. No counterparty or commercial-bank credit risk, no waiting for a clearing cycle.
  • No amount ceiling on T2 - T2 is built for high-value and urgent payments. Where SEPA schemes have practical limits, T2 has none; the average T2 transaction is EUR 4.5 million.
  • Instant, 24/7/365 on TIPS - TIPS settles instant payments in seconds, every day of the year, with final settlement in central bank money. You skip the Centrolink or EKS intermediary.
  • Pan-European reach - any T2 participant (all euro-area banks and many beyond) can be paid directly by BIC, and TIPS reaches every instant-payment participant in the euro area, which the Instant Payments Regulation now requires all euro-area PSPs to be.
  • Speed at scale - T2 settles around 430,000 payments worth roughly EUR 1.9 trillion every business day, 99.7% of them in under two minutes.
  • Priority control - T2 payments carry a settlement priority (NORM by default, HIGH when a payment must jump the queue).
  • Open to non-bank PSPs - since October 2025, EEA payment institutions and e-money institutions can hold their own TARGET accounts under the Eurosystem’s access policy. You no longer need to be a bank to settle in central bank money.

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Where it saves money

A T2 account by itself is not cheaper than SEPA. It is the settlement account that unlocks direct scheme participation, and that is where the money is: Rule of thumb: the direct route pays for itself from roughly 1.5 million SDD collections a year; below that it is a strategic decision (own participation, independence from a CSM, settlement under your own BIC). Fixed costs to budget: STEP2 EUR 30,000 joining plus about EUR 55,000-65,000 a year; T2 account EUR 150 a month (option A) or EUR 1,875 (option B); TIPS a monthly account fee only. All figures are scheme and central bank fees only; Inventi’s onboarding and service fees for TARGET access apply on top and are quoted per client.
Non-bank PSPs hold TARGET accounts on the same technical terms as banks, with three limits (ECB Decision (EU) 2025/222): no intraday credit, an end-of-day holding cap of twice your peak daily outgoing value over the last 12 months (funds positioned in TIPS or STEP2 do not count), and unremunerated balances. Client funds are still safeguarded at a credit institution.

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How TARGET Services fit next to your other rails

If you already send SEPA payments through the platform, TARGET Services use the same accounts view, the same webhooks and the same payment APIs - TIPS settlement is transparent to your SEPA Instant integration, and T2 is one more scheme (T2) in the same integration.
Last modified on September 7, 2026