10 May 2012

EPC: Get Ready for SEPA by February 2014 – Impact of the SEPA Regulation on Payment Service Users

The SEPA Regulation stipulates the mandatory deadlines for compliance with its rules for euro credit transfer and direct debit transactions. In the euro area, this will be 1 February 2014, subject to certain limited exemptions mentioned in the SEPA Regulation. Effectively, this means that as of this date, existing national euro credit transfer and direct debit schemes will be replaced by SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) and SEPA Direct Debit (SDD). To achieve compliance with the core provisions of the SEPA Regulation, PSUs have to implement significant changes to their operational models, including investing in system upgrades, testing and staff training.

Article 5 details the technical and business requirements that should be observed when carrying out euro credit transfer and direct debit transactions. It also references the data elements detailed in the Annex to the Regulation that should be provided with a credit transfer and a direct debit payment. Article 5 mandates PSUs to:

• provide the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) of the account that should be credited or debited and, where necessary, the Business Identifier Code (BIC) of the account-holding payment service provider;
• make arrangements to adapt to the usage of ISO 20022 XML message standards in the customer-to-bank space in relation to files of payment transactions.

In addition, Article 5 sets out the rights of consumers with regard to direct debit collections, which are also relevant for payees (billers). Article 5 (3) (d) empowers a payer to be able to instruct its PSP to take the following actions in respect of direct debit collections:

• to limit a direct debit collection to a certain amount and/or periodicity;
• to verify each direct debit transaction and to check whether the amount and periodicity of the submitted direct debit transaction is equal to the amount and periodicity agreed in the mandate (where the mandate under the relevant payment scheme does not provide for the right to a refund) before debiting their payment account, based on the mandate-related information;
• to block any direct debits to the payer's payment account, or to block or authorise any direct debits initiated by one or more specified payees.

The SEPA Regulation ensures the continued legal validity of existing direct debit mandates under the SDD Scheme, provided that these fall within the provisions of Article 7. This facilitates the transition to SDD for both billers and their customers.

Article 16, in an attempt to respond to a broad range of requests for flexibility articulated by various parties throughout the legislative process, has introduced several exemptions. As highlighted above, it permits individual EU Member States to extend the deadline for compliance with some of the provisions of the SEPA Regulation to 1 February 2016. It is arguable that this attempt at flexibility breeds confusion and risks translating into a prolonged patchwork of national variations, leaving PSPs and PSUs uncertain as to what will apply, when, where and how. The market will have more clarity by 1 February 2013, by which time EU Member States must notify the European Commission of the derogations that they intend to use (see Article 16 (7)).

It is strongly recommended that PSUs analyse the impact of the SEPA Regulation on their operational models now, even if EU Member States opt to make use of the derogations permissible under Article 16. To date, the experience of early movers on the end user side handling major payment volumes indicates that migration to SEPA Schemes and technical standards requires careful planning. The relevant actions and resources should be identified as soon as possible.

Full information

© EPC