In February 2012, the European Parliament adopted the ‘Regulation establishing technical and business requirements for credit transfers and direct debits in euro and amending Regulation (EC) No 924/2009' (the SEPA Regulation), which defines 1 February 2014 as the deadline in the euro area for compliance with the core provisions of this 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). The experience of early movers handling major payment volumes indicates that it takes (at least) two years to complete migration to the SEPA payment schemes and standards.
Deutsche Post Pension Service Business Division started its SEPA migration project in early 2009 and essentially completed the process in June 2011. Stefan Scheidgen, Head of Cash Management and Accounting at Deutsche Post Pension Service Business Division said: “If you are a bigger company (more than 5,000 master data records and more than three IT systems), run! This means you must act now".
SEPA project managers who shared their migration experience in the EPC Newsletter identified the following challenges:
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conversion of customer account data to the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) and the Business Identifier Code (BIC);
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implementation of the ISO 20022 message standards;
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adaptation to SDD mandate requirements;
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alignment of interfaces with customers and business partners to ensure seamless end-to-end payment processing.
These early movers however also confirm that migration to SEPA pays off. Stefan Scheidgen points out: "We have accomplished execution times of just one business day for SCTs, which allows our contracting partners to save liquidity. In the process of migrating to SEPA, we consolidated the previous four payment systems into one. We plan to automate our banking processes further, based on the implementation of SEPA schemes and standards, which will result in even more efficiency."
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