There is alot of blurb out there about SEPA Payments, SEPA Credit Transfers – SCT. You can spend hours reading that, here i want to cut to the chase and give you a quick overview of some of the information i have found most useful.
SEPA Credit Transfers:
- My first port of call for relevant information is the European Payments Council SEPA Credit Transfer page
- This is the main page, and has all of the information you need
- It tells you about:
- Payment Schemes
- Newsletters
- Technical documentation
- From here, the most useful sources of information for me were the:
- SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme Rulebook – all 125 pages of it 🙂
- SEPA Credit Transfer Implementation Guidelines
Key points that i have paid particular attention to inlcude:
- Probably stating the obvious, but SEPA Credit Transfers only affect payments in Euro‘s where the payer and payees bank is located in the EEA (European Economic Area)
- SEPA Payments must be delivered to the bank / Payment Service Providers (PSP’s) in the SEPA ISO XML format
- sometimes the language used is confusing, but basically SEPA ISO XML = PAIN.001
- PAIN.001 is a ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) XML (technical format) message for SEPA payment initiation
- Check what version of the PAIN.001 you’re source system / ERP system can produce, and verify it with what your bank can accept / process
- Also, keep in mind that some banks will accept legacy (your existing, non-SEPA formatted) files. You need to check this out with your bank – they’ll probably charge you an arm and a leg for their conversion services, but its good to know whats possible!
- sometimes the language used is confusing, but basically SEPA ISO XML = PAIN.001
- Bank Identifier Codes (BIC) / International Bank Account Number (IBAN) under SEPA are mandatory
- You need to think about how you will collect your suppliers BIC / IBAN numbers
- Will your business system / ERP store the BIC & IBAN information?
- Will you use:
- An online calculator to determine the BIC and IBAN
- A third party company to convert your existing bank account details to BIC/IBAN?
- There are many options here….
- More on this very soon…..
I expect the above list will change as i learn more, and progress through different implementations. Let me know what SEPA Credit Transfer information you have found most useful….