In this article you will find out:
how quickly you learn that a QR payment has been received,
how QR payments work at GoPay,
and what affects their speed.
How quickly do you learn that a QR payment has been received at GoPay?
QR payments through GoPay are designed to be as fast as possible. In most cases we report the payment within 2 minutes.
69 % of payments are marked as paid within 2 minutes
89% of payments are marked as paid within 15 minutes
96 % of payments are marked as paid the same day
The exact times are shown in the picture below. The data comes from GoPay measurements since the new QR payment mode was introduced in April 2025.
How do QR payments work at GoPay?
1. GoPay always creates a QR payment as an instant payment – this is part of the QR code the customer scans at the gateway.
After the QR code is scanned, the payment should therefore always be created as an instant payment. If it is not, it may mean that:
the bank in question currently has an outage of instant payments,
the bank has an error in its app which does not process the QR order correctly,
it is one of the banks that does not support instant payments.
2. The payment is sent to the customer's bank in instant payment mode – the customer makes it as an instant payment if their bank supports this service.
The Czech National Bank also publishes a list of participants in instant payments. At the time of writing this article the latest version is from 8 April 2025, and instant payments are supported by almost all Czech banks, and by all those through which more than 99 % of payments through the payment gateway are made.
3. GoPay continuously monitors the arrival of money in its collection account – and then informs the merchant and the customer that the payment has arrived.
GoPay monitors the movements on the collection account for QR payments. As soon as a payment reaches the account, GoPay can mark it as paid at the following intervals:
every 5 seconds during the first two minutes after it is credited to the account,
every 5 minutes during the following hour after it is credited to the account.
What affects the speed of QR payments?
The speed of QR payments depends on the speed at which instant payments are processed in the CERTIS system.
This is described on the CNB website. Technically speaking, no exact limit is guaranteed, but expressions such as this are used: An instant payment is transferred within a few seconds.
Empirical measurements are also given: Processing from the moment the payment is sent by the payer's bank to the moment it is received by the payee's bank, which includes checks on the CERTIS side, losses on the network infrastructure and checks on the payee's bank side, takes less than 0.5 seconds for half of the payments made and less than 1.5 seconds for 99 % of the payments made.
In addition, instant payments are not limited by holidays, weekends or the time of day: Instant payments are processed continuously, at night and at weekends, and very quickly and reliably.
If that is not the case – for example if a bank does not create a payment as instant at night, or processing takes longer – it is an exceptional situation or a shortcoming on the bank's side.