I'm pretty sure this new ruling is only for bank transfers, not card payments.

Your card payment is technically instant, since you get the goods in the store at he same time as the money leaves your balance. Both parts agree that it happened. The waiting time until the store actually gets the money deposited in their bank isn't dependent on bank. First it sits in the terminal until it is reported to the card company at the end of day. Depending on the specific agreement they can then accrue several days of transactions before even starting doing the bank transfer. Some do it daily, but I don't know of anyone doing it more frequently than that. For debit cards that is. Other payment methods can be faster or slower, but it really isn't the bank to blame for this.

Bank transfers should be faster than card settlements. The current setup is that banks also acrue transactions and exchange them one or two times daily. This has one benefit for users, since at a known time, they can surely know that there won't be coming more payments that day. This information is f.i. usable for debt collectors. Doing faster payments is obviously better, but it will also mean that due times need to be specified by the hour and will probably cause some arguments about when a payment was actually done. Also even with faster payments, interest calculations are done on a daily basis, not hourly, so there'll still be a technical cut-off time that determines who actually had the money on that day even if it was moved to different accounts several times on a day. So sure, it may theoretically free up some money, but it won't make much practical difference anyway.