Tatiana Nikitina's, (Cash and Banking Analyst at British American Tobacco) stand-out presentation at The Association of Corporate Treasurers Annual Conference, showed, in fascinating detail, what is actually involved for a large group implementing SEPA. BAT run a centralised treasury in London with four regional SSCs. The scope of the BAT project was 29 countries 17 by 2014 + 12 by 2016, credit transfers in all countries and SDD in three countries, nine banks and SAP in 24 countries and non-SAP installations in five. The project involved staff from five functions: finance, IT, HR (for payroll) trade & logistics (for direct debit mandate management) and procurement (for vendors).

After considerable investigation, the SEPA project began in November 2012 with the project run centrally from London with a Project Board of 5 + a project manager (Tatiana) + 3 country heads and 3 IT staff, plus a SEPA project team from each bank. They have weekly project calls with all concerned and recommend having a senior IT person on the project board.

BAT outsourced the data conversion to a third party, but kept the direct debit mandate management in-house where they found the biggest problem was the correct registration of the mandate by the customer's bank. In payroll conversion, the problem was getting the 15 payroll agencies to develop XML files and testing whether these worked or not by sending penny test payments. They found that the biggest problem was that the agencies and the software providers were/are not ready for SEPA.

The timetable for the BAT SEPA project is:

1. Kick off work shop:  Done - 12 Nov 2012
2. Master data conversion for vendors: Done - 20 Feb 2013
3. Reaching out to the vendors for bank accounts: In progress - March - May
4. Resigning B2B mandates Germany: In progress -  March - July
5. Payroll (contacting, master data, testing): In progress - March - July
6. Internal IT conFiguration: In progress - March - May
7. Testing:  In progress - March – July
8. SEPA compliance:  Internal timeline  - Sep 2013.

BAT has set themselves an early target date to allow extra time for compliance by February 2014.

Lessons learnt
BAT lessons learnt from their SEPA project were:

• think as widely as possible about the impact of SEPA
• ensure buy-in from senior stakeholder
• communicate, communicate with all involved
• check that your systems are ready for XML
• don't forget payroll.

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The overall lesson from the BAT case study is that SEPA is far wider and deeper in scope than most realise, and will take dedicated resources to ensure that your company is SEPA ready and compliant by February 2014.