CBI has extended its Request to Pay (RTP) service to the corporate market after months of its proven utility in public administration settings, the Milan-based paytech announced on June 17, working with longtime infrastructure partners EBA CLEARING and Nexi. Though the service is now confined to the domestic market, companies plan wider rollout next year.
Request to Pay lets a business send a structured digital payment request straight into a customer’s home banking or mobile banking app, pre-filled with amount, reference, and due-date data. The payer reviews and authorizes the payment in a few taps, with no manual entry and no separate invoice to reconcile by hand.
“Bringing Request to Pay to the service of corporates means providing a concrete tool to simplify and enhance the efficiency of collection and payment processes,” said Liliana Fratini Passi, CBI’s Managing Director.
This pan-European service was developed and implemented with the support of 27 PSPs from 11 European countries for the launch date of the SEPA Request-to-Pay Scheme created by the European Payments Council (EPC) in 2021.
Unlike direct debit, where the payer pre-authorizes future pulls, RTP keeps each request and its authorization as two distinct steps. The company sends the ask, the customer approves it, and the payment only moves once that approval happens. For businesses, the appeal is faster, more predictable collections; automated reconciliation that plugs into existing accounting systems; and a paper trail that should, in theory, cut down on payment disputes and fraud.
The corporate version isn’t CBI’s first outing with this infrastructure. Payments to the Italian Public Administration were the original use case, tested through 2025 and pushed into live operation around March 2026. It allowed government entities to send payment notices directly to citizens’ banking apps instead of mailing paper bills. That gives the corporate rollout roughly three months of working precedent to point to, built on the same CBI Globe, EBA CLEARING R2P, and Nexi technology stack now being extended to business-to-customer collections.
Although CBI’s market materials describe RTP as reaching “across Italy and the SEPA area,” in practice, the corporate service now remains in a pilot phase, with onboarding of institutions, corporates, and banks currently limited to the domestic Italian market. A broader rollout into other European geographies is targeted for the first half of 2027, the companies confirmed upon PaySpace Magazine Global’s request, meaning no cross-border use cases are live today. That coincides with the partners’ staged strategy for the service: starting with limited public use cases, then proceeding to the corporate realm, and giving domestic firms enough time to test RTP before wider SEPA rollout.
“We are proud to collaborate with CBI and the Payment Service Providers it serves to extend the benefits of ‘Request to Pay’ to new customer segments. Leveraging our R2P Service, Italian PSPs will be able to expand the value-added services they offer to corporates and their customers, both at a national and European level,” noted Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management at EBA CLEARING.
What is confirmed for now: once RTP notices are live, the payments they trigger will be compatible with all transaction methods already available across both retail and commercial channels, so the rollout doesn’t require merchants or banks to adopt new payment rails alongside it, only the request layer itself is new.
It’s a familiar shape for Nexi specifically. The company has been building out this same connector role elsewhere in Europe. In March 2026, it expanded its agreement with Danish banks, including the BOKIS cooperative, to deliver SEPA Direct Debit services, supplying the cross-border infrastructure that lets domestic banks plug into the wider SEPA scheme without building it themselves. RTP’s planned 2027 expansion looks like the same model applied to request-to-pay: Nexi and EBA CLEARING providing the interoperable rails, domestic banks and PSPs handling distribution to their own customers, with cross-border reach added once the domestic base is proven.
“The extension of Request to Pay to the corporate world, in addition to strengthening our collaboration with two long-standing partners in CBI and EBA CLEARING, represents a strategic lever to digitalize companies’ financial processes and enhance their efficiency and integration,” commented Renato Martini, Digital Banking Solutions Director at Nexi Group. “It is a convenient and secure service that, also thanks to our technology, enables more advanced management of payments between businesses and their customers, in line with our mission to provide innovative digital solutions capable of simplifying payment processes.”
Both Erwin Kulk of EBA CLEARING and Renato Martini of Nexi Group both framed the move as building toward services “at a national and European level”. Whether that pan-European ambition holds to its 2027 target will largely depend on how the domestic pilot performs over the next several months.
