[MaBu]

It was never free or instant. It only works from 9-15 on workdays and not on weekends. Also if there are holidays in eu also doesn't work for domestic transfers. Easter is fun whe it stops for 4 days even though country has only 3 state holidays during those times. Costs from 25-40 cents per domestic transaction or 7-17 euro per over border one. Depending on the bank.

It takes around an hour or some days over border for transfer to go through.

Maybe you think of sepa instant which is supported by some banks. Very new. Mostly used for people to people transfers. Some shops are starting to support it. It is actually instantaneous anc works weekends. It seems to be mostly free.

[Radim]

In addition, SEPA was never free. So OP is also wrong there.

The regulation only stipulates "equality of charges", that the bank's fees for a payment into another SEPA country/bank must be the same as into the same bank or within the same country [0]. I.e. no payment fee discrimination across SEPA: if my Czech bank X charges me Y for a local EUR payment into X, it must also charge me Y for the same EUR payment into Italy, for example.

Would any bank actually charge their customers Y>0 like that? Yes they would. For example the Bank of Cyprus (in Cyprus, which is in both EU & SEPA) will charge you 6 EUR for a SEPA payment of 1200 EUR if the sender is a physical person, and 10 EUR if legal person [1]. And 4 EUR for smaller EUR amounts. Far from "free".

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/924/oj

[1] https://www.bankofcyprus.com/globalassets/cyprus/org_methods... [PDF]