The European Payments Council (EPC) has published new versions of the SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT), SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) Core (SDD Core), and SDD Business to Business (SDD B2B) scheme rulebooks. These will take effect in November 2017. Scheme participants now have one year to adapt their systems.

The SEPA schemes are used by thousands of Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in Europe, and facilitate some 36 billion transactions per year.

The main update in all three rulebooks is 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).

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CTMfile take: According to the EPC, the updates in the SEPA rulebooks will benefit corporate customers that transact in various SEPA countries or with different PSP partners.