Yes, it takes 10 minutes on average for a transaction to be included in a block. Potentially much longer if you are unlucky or didn't pay a high enough fee. On top of that most places won't accept just one block. The standard is 6 blocks, so 1 hour on average. That's the price you pay for a truly trustless distributed system. Still (much) faster than ACH or wire transfers or securities trade settlement.
SEPA instant will settle transactions 10 seconds. Drawbacks: banks can opt to participate, initially limited to 15k EUR, plus not obvious what the cost is. Banks are charged 1 EUR per transaction, so it'll be at least 1 EUR charged to customers.
The price of a transaction is as important as the speed, IMO.
Private transfers: instant transactions between individuals, no transaction fees. (Though I suspect internally they do the usual reconciliation between banks at the end of the day).
Business: instant transactions to your account from your customers. Yearly fee: 500 SEK ($61), price per transaction: 2 SEK ($0.24), price per reimbursed transaction: 2 SEK ($0.24)
There are also limits on how much money you can send in one go, but it's usually more than enough for individual transactions and for small businesses.
.. but slower than contactless or other card transactions, and (usually) slower than Faster Payments.
(Comparing to securities settlement is interesting, because cryptocurrency exchanges use off-blockchain "settlement" within themselves. Trades execute near-instantly because they're just updating a database. However, settling your money out of an exchange can take a lot longer)
> settling your money out of an exchange can take a lot longer
Usually only if there's something wrong, like a technical or KYC issue. In many cases it is possible to execute a trade and withdraw as fast as the blockchain (or your bank) will allow.
