Clear2Pay

SEPA Credit Transfers (SCT)
On the Open Payment Framework

Consolidating Eurozone Credit Transfers

The worthy primary aim of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is to ensure that euro payments, whether domestic or cross border, are handled with the same level of service and at the same price. This is essentially the logical second phase of monetary union that saw the introduction of the euro currency notes and coins.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is seeking to transform fragmented national payments systems into a single payments area (SEPA), essentially making all euro payments domestic for European citizens and companies. SEPA promises users potentially lower costs and greater transparency of fees, but banks will lose revenue currently earned on cross-border remittances made through the various national payments systems. SEPA covers three main aspects; direct debits, credit transfers and card payments. From a payments perspective, the Direct Debits and Credit Transfers pose the largest challenges.

SEPA Credit Transfers
Compliance with credit transfers under SEPA is considerably less complex than the parallel direct debit scheme and can be viewed as a first step towards overall SEPA compliance with full SEPA Direct Debit support. SCT compliance covers initiation and receipt of credit transfers (originator and beneficiary banks), support of BIC and IBAN, support for UNIFI ISO20022 messages, exception management (R-transactions) and PEACH interfacing (e.g. STEP2). All this needs to be ready by the start of 2008. Many banks have already addressed, or are currently addressing SEPA Credit Transfers based on compliance with EC directive 2560/2001 and the fact that the difference between domestic and SEPA Credit Transfers is relatively limited, more so when compared to the more complex Direct Debit scheme. However, developments are already underway to augment the standard SCT system with the launch of the Euro Banking Association’s “Priority Payments Scheme”. This enables urgent credit transfers to be completed end-to-end within 4 hours as opposed to the standard 3 day execution for SCTs.

SEPA Credit Transfers - Payment Flows

An Open Payment Framework to support SEPA
Clear2Pay’s Open Payment Framework is already SEPA compliant. The Open Payment Framework (OPF) from Clear2Pay is a library of component building blocks from which payments solutions can be derived. The Open Payment Framework is built entirely on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) delivering common, reusable services consisting of a comprehensive data model, choreographed payment business processes and configurable services including parsing, validation, cost-based routing, warehousing, security, auditing and many more.

More information on SEPA
More information on SEPA Direct Debits

Single Euro Payments Area Brochure 1,0 MB
SEPA Direct Debits Brochure 932 KB
SEPA Credit Transfers Brochure 1,0 MB

Download SEPA white paper

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