To make sure that SMEs and retail clients will not have to wait for their money as well as to provide safe transfers, MEPs voted to update the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) legislation. Payment service providers (PSPs) such as banks, providing transfer services in euro, would also be required to offer service of instant credit transfers. Member states whose currency is not the euro should be able to apply the rules to domestic instant transfers in their currency.
Instant credit transfer
An instant credit transfer is supposed to be executed regardless of the day or hour and immediately processed, so that the payee’s payment account is credited with the amount transferred within 10 seconds after the time of receipt of the payment order.
Where a payment order for an instant credit transfer in euro is submitted from a payment account that is not denominated in euro, a PSP should convert the amount of transaction from the currency in which the payment account is denominated into euro, immediately upon receiving that payment order.
Customer safety, penalties and sanctions
MEPs stressed that PSPs should have in place robust and up-to-date fraud detection and prevention measures, flexible enough to deal with new challenges.
To this end, PSPs operating in the EU should immediately and without any additional charges or fees, provide a service to verify whether there is any discrepancy between the payment account identifier of the payee and the name of the payee provided by the payer.
Where a discrepancy is detected, a client should be notified, and where such information is not provided, a client should be compensated by a PSP for any financial damage. As an additional safeguard against fraud, PSPs should allow its clients to set a maximum amount for instant credit transfers in euro, which could be easily modified prior to the next transfer.
Moreover, PSPs offering instant credit transfers should verify whether any of their clients are subject to sanctions or other restrictive measures related to the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing...
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