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The changes in the rulebooks that will enter into effect in November 2017 (the ‘2017 rulebooks’) derive from the regular schemes’ change management cycle. Following a call for change requests, the European Payments Council (EPC) received 40 change requests and reviewed them all. A 90 day public consultation on all received change requests was organised ending in July 2016. All change requests received, and the decisions made by the EPC to take them forward or not, including the rationale behind these decisions, are available on the EPC website in the ‘Change Proposal Submission Document’.
The main update, which will be included in the rulebooks for all three schemes, features the obligation for scheme participants to accept at least, but not exclusively, Customer-to-Bank (C2B) SEPA payment message files based on the EPC’s C2B SEPA scheme Implementation Guidelines (IGs).
Customers will still have the choice either to continue using their existing C2B payment message file set-up or to opt for the C2B payment message file based on EPC specifications. On the other hand, the scheme participants will have to be technically capable of supporting C2B payment message files based on the EPC specifications. This change results from a recommendation from the Euro Retail Payments Board.
It will benefit corporate customers which transact in various SEPA countries or with different PSP partners. It is a step towards greater harmonisation across the SEPA region.
Other changes to the rulebooks include, for the SCT scheme, inquiry procedures between the beneficiary bank and the originator bank as well as a concrete procedure for originator banks to handle a ‘request for recall by the originator’ for a reason other than duplicate sending, technical problems resulting in erroneous SCT(s) and a fraudulently originated SCT. Both changes will only become effective as of 18 November 2018.
The new versions of the SDD Core and SDD B2B rulebooks contain a formal reference to the EPC ‘Guidance on Reason Codes for SDD R-transactions’, which will be kept outside of the rulebooks to allow more flexibility when updating. In addition, the period during which collections under the SDD B2B scheme can be returned, has been extended from two to three interbank business days. This should lead to a decrease in the number of SDD B2B returns.
SEPA_Credit Transfer scheme rulebook
SEPA_Direct Debit Core scheme rulebook
SEPA_Direct Debit Business to Business scheme rulebook