The Commission published its proposal for this Regulation on 16 December 2010. The proposal aims at establishing an Internal Market for payment services in euro (Single Euro Payments Area, or SEPA) in which there is no difference of regime between cross-border and national payments. Integrating European payment markets should offer substantial economic benefits by increasing competition and innovation, contributing to lower payment costs for consumers and firms and making cross-border payments as easy as domestic ones. The impact assessment notes that possible benefits to the European economy could amount to €100-300 billion in six years time.

SEPA was originally put forward as a primarily market-driven project. At the same time, it represents a major policy initiative which has been consistently supported in particular by the European Parliament, the Commission and the European Central Bank. Union-wide schemes for credit transfers and direct debits were designed and implemented by the European Payments Council (EPC), a coordination and decision-making body set up by the European banking sector. On 28 January 2008, the SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) was launched, followed by the SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) on 2 November 2009. However, migration to the new schemes has turned out to be slow: in October 2010, two years after the launch of SCT, the share of SCTs among all transactions processed by clearing and settlement mechanisms stood at only 9.3 per cent. The share of SDD was around 1 percent.

In order to ensure timely transition, setting a migration end-date in legislation has been called for. In particular, the EP has called for "a clear, appropriate and binding end-date, which should be no later than 31 December 2012 for migrating to SEPA instruments" in two resolutions in March 2009 and March 2010. The Rapporteur has responded to this call by promoting a rather rapid end-date, since otherwise the situation would be unfair to early movers.

The regulation proposed by the Commission stipulates that national credit transfer and direct debit electronic payment schemes should be phased out 12 and 24 months respectively after the entry into force of the Regulation. They would be replaced by the Union-wide schemes.

The regulation requires the use of certain common standards and technical requirements, such as the use of international bank account numbers (IBAN), bank identifier codes (BIC) and a financial services messaging standard (ISO 20022 XML) for all bank account payments in euro in the EU.

The Rapporteur is of the opinion that there should be only one end-date in order to allow for an easier migration. This end-date should be two years after the entry into force of the regulation, in order to provide enough time for migration also in those Member States where the migration process has been slow. One end-date would also make it simpler to inform the public and the necessary information campaigns could be made more effective.

It is appropriate that the Commission should have delegated powers to change the technical requirements, but the Rapporteur has moved many requirements considered essential from the annex into the regulation and thus limited the scope of delegation. When using the delegated powers it should be expected that the Commission consults the relevant stakeholders, like the SEPA Council, or the SEPA experts group and others.

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