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The SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT), SEPA Direct Debit Core (SDD Core), and SDD Business-to-Business (SDD B2B) scheme rulebooks are subject to public consultations until 4 July 2016. These consultations are designed to ensure that the schemes reflect market’s needs and technological changes.
The European Payments Council (EPC) called for suggestions to the existing rulebooks in 2015. All stakeholders (Payment Service Providers, end users, technical players) are now invited to submit their comments on the nearly 40 change requests received.
Jean-Yves Jacquelin highlights in this Blog some examples of change requests and what they would mean for the schemes’ development, and encourages all stakeholders to have their say and participate in the public consultation.
The current ‘recommended-only’ Customer-to-Bank Implementation Guidelines (C2B IGs) becoming mandatory IGs
This change request stems from a recommendation made by the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) at the end of 2014.
In the event that an SCT originator or an SDD creditor wishes to use these EPC C2B file specifications for its initiation message files, they will have the certainty that every scheme participant is technically capable of processing their SCT and SDD transactions based on these EPC specifications.
Amendments to the character set in the C2B and inter-bank IGs to allow the use of national characters in SCT and SDD transactions
The aim of this change request is to extend the current limited SEPA character set in the interbank pacs messages to the UTF-8 character set (the UTF-8 is a character set capable of encoding all possible characters). This would allow the acceptance of SCT and SDD transactions that contain national characters.
Remittance information: extension in the number of characters for both structured and unstructured information and the combined use of both types of such information in a single transaction
These change requests concern both SCT and SDD transactions. As for the extension of remittance information, the EPC itself suggested making additional information available outside of the SCT/SDD message in the ‘cloud’. This would provide additional information feeds to the payment service users (PSUs) outside the SEPA payment infrastructure, thus facilitating the personalised exchange of unlimited information between PSUs.
Extension of the SDD B2B collection return period from two to three Interbank Business Days
The PSP communities which have requested this change indicate that it is often difficult for the debtor bank to resolve exceptional situations (e.g. funding arrangements, missing SDD B2B mandate confirmation) at the end of two business days. This problem is exacerbated when the SDD B2B collection due date, or one of the two subsequent Interbank Business Days, is a local public holiday in the debtor bank’s country. Depending on the organisation of the PSP, some decisions may need a human intervention.