Open Banking and Instant Payments in Turkey: FAST, QR and GEÇİT

Turkey’s account-to-account payment stack has four components that fit together: FAST, the central bank’s 24/7 instant payment system; Easy Addressing (KOLAS), which lets people pay to a phone number or e-mail instead of an IBAN; TR QR code (TR Karekod), a national QR standard for merchant payments; and open banking, with a national API standard (ÖHVPS) and a central gateway (GEÇİT) run by BKM. This guide explains each component for foreign founders and investors, with the latest official numbers.

FAST: the instant payment rail

FAST (Fonların Anlık ve Sürekli Transferi, “instant and continuous transfer of funds”) is operated by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT, Turkish: TCMB). It went live on 8 January 2021 together with Easy Addressing (CBRT press release 2021-01).

Key characteristics:

• 24/7/365, Turkish lira only, settles in seconds with finality.
• Used for transfers between institutions; a transfer within the same bank is an internal transfer (havale), not FAST.
• Participants include banks and, since 2023, payment and e-money institutions that join directly (CBRT press release 2022-53). The CBRT’s participant list includes digital banks such as Enpara Bank, Colendi Bank, FUPS Bank and Ziraat Dinamik, as well as Papara, iyzico, Moka United, Sipay and Turkcell Ödeme among the non-banks.

FAST in numbers (CBRT Annual Report 2025)

Indicator	2025
Transactions	5.4 billion
Value	TRY 43.23 trillion
Daily average value	TRY 118.46 billion
Busiest day	28.7 million transactions (15 September 2025)
Participants (31 December 2025)	49
Easy Addressing unique customers (31 December 2025)	26 million

For comparison, the large-value EFT system processed TRY 932.11 trillion in 2025 (same source): FAST dominates retail transfers by count, while EFT carries high-value interbank flows.

FAST limits (September 2026)

Transaction type	Per-transaction ceiling	Since
Person-to-person FAST transfer	TRY 300,000	26 Aug 2026
Request to Pay (Ödeme İste)	TRY 300,000	26 Aug 2026
FAST-TR QR merchant payment (dynamic, authenticated)	TRY 300,000	26 Aug 2026
FAST Secure Payment (second-hand vehicle sales at notaries)	TRY 5,000,000	CBRT FAST FAQ

Source: CBRT press release 2026-36 (24 August 2026); CBRT FAST FAQ. The ceiling is per transaction; the CBRT does not set a daily FAST limit, but banks and payment institutions may apply lower daily or per-channel limits for fraud control.

History of the ceiling:

Period	Transfer	QR merchant payment
Until 3 Apr 2024	TRY 50,000	TRY 100,000
4 Apr 2024 – 25 Aug 2026	TRY 100,000	TRY 250,000
From 26 Aug 2026	TRY 300,000	TRY 300,000

Fees: the CBRT sets a cap on FAST fees by communiqué; each institution sets its actual fee below the cap.

Easy Addressing (KOLAS)

Easy Addressing maps a person’s or company’s account to an alias: mobile phone number, e-mail, Turkish ID number or foreigner ID number, tax number or passport number. A person can register up to five aliases (CBRT FAST FAQ). With 26 million unique customers at the end of 2025 (CBRT Annual Report 2025), KOLAS is the default way to send money to friends and small businesses without asking for an IBAN.

For a product team, this means onboarding flows can use a phone number to collect or pay out, and wallet-to-bank payouts can reach any FAST participant without card rails.

TR QR code (TR Karekod)

The CBRT’s TR QR code regulation (21 August 2020) created a single national standard for QR codes in payment services. The same standard supports card-based QR payments at POS terminals, cash withdrawals at ATMs and, via FAST, account-to-account merchant payments.

According to the CBRT Annual Report 2025:

Indicator	Status (2025 report)
Domestic POS terminals accepting card payments via TR QR code	about 90%
ATMs allowing cash withdrawal via TR QR code	almost all
POS terminals enabling FAST-based TR QR payments	over 41%

FAST-TR QR merchant payments carry the same TRY 300,000 ceiling as transfers since 26 August 2026. For small merchants the attraction is a low-cost acceptance channel without card scheme economics; for fintechs, QR is also how foreign wallets connect: since July 2026, Chinese visitors can pay with Weixin Pay (WeChat Pay) at merchants accepting TR QR codes through a partnership with the licensed e-money institution PayPorter, with transactions authorised over TROY; by September 2026 it covered 53 provinces (Fintechtime, September 2026).

Open banking: ÖHVPS and GEÇİT

Legal basis

Turkey is not subject to PSD2. It introduced open banking through Law No. 6493 and the CBRT’s December 2021 Regulation on Payment Services and E-Money Issuance, which define two licensed services:

• Account information service (hesap bilgisi hizmeti, HBH) — service (g) on the CBRT register: aggregating account and transaction data across providers with the user’s consent.
• Payment initiation service (ödeme emri başlatma hizmeti, ÖEBH) — service (f): initiating a payment from the user’s bank account with consent.

A separate CBRT communiqué of the same date set information systems requirements and the framework for payment services data sharing services (ÖHVPS), the national API standard. Banks’ side was prepared by BDDK’s March 2020 information systems regulation.

GEÇİT: the central gateway

Instead of every third party integrating with every bank, Turkey routes open banking calls through GEÇİT, a gateway operated by BKM (Interbank Card Center). Banks started offering payment initiation and account information via GEÇİT in December 2022. The CBRT Annual Report 2025 states that 39 payment service providers had completed technical certification on the platform. CBRT integration deadlines for providers were set at 31 March and 31 December 2025 (CBRT announcement, March 2026).

ÖHVPS 2.0.0 (March 2026)

On 17 March 2026 the CBRT announced version 2.0.0 of the standard, adding:

• comprehensive card information and card transactions data;
• future-dated payment orders;
• recurring payment order initiation.

At that time the system had 53 participants, 16.4 million active users and an average of 12.3 million operations per day (CBRT announcement, reported by Alomaliye). A December 2025 amendment to the payment services regulation also opened room for value-added services on top of payment initiation and account information.

How open banking and FAST combine

A payment initiated through ÖEBH can settle over FAST in seconds. The combination — consent in the bank app, instant settlement, no card — is the basis for “pay by bank” checkouts, invoice collection, wallet top-ups and B2B collections. Recurring payment initiation in ÖHVPS 2.0.0 extends this toward subscriptions and instalment collection.

What this means for foreign players

If you want to…	Route
Aggregate account data (PFM, accounting, credit scoring)	Account information licence (g), or partner with a licensed provider
Offer pay-by-bank at checkout	Payment initiation licence (f), or a licensed partner
Pay out instantly to Turkish accounts	Partner with a FAST participant, or become an e-money/payment institution and join FAST
Accept QR payments at merchants	Acquiring licence (c) or partner acquirer supporting TR QR

Screen scraping of bank credentials is outside the regulatory framework; data access must go through licensed providers and user consent. The licensing path is explained in payment and e-money licensing in Turkey.

Where the stack is heading

The Medium-Term Programme 2027–2029 (announced 6 September 2026) targets expanding FAST overlay services, a higher share for the domestic card scheme TROY, and completion of the Digital Turkish Lira infrastructure in Q3 2027. In August 2026, 23 Digital Turkish Lira projects from 12 banks and 6 payment/e-money institutions entered the sandbox (CBRT press release 2026-33); categories include programmable payments, tokenisation and interoperability. There is no decision yet to issue a digital lira to the public.

For all milestones see the regulation timeline; for live figures see the Turkish data centre.