Companies have to implement significant changes to their operational models to move to SEPA. They have to invest in system upgrades, testing and staff training. The scope of the changes is extensive.

In February 2012, the SEPA pioneers – who started migration planning as early as 2007 or 2008 – unanimously recommended that organisations, which have yet to adapt systems and operations to the SEPA payment instruments, become active immediately. The EPC Newsletter now says, this is no longer a recommendation but an imperative: any organisation which has not yet initiated the migration process must act now; there is no time to procrastinate further. Is that really true?

LinkedIn Debate
On CTMfile's Group on LinkedIn I posted the following question:

The two conclusions from the debatge that all agreed on, were:

• the 'do nothing' approach shouldn't be the default
• payments would flow if you did nothing, but at a price. It would be expensive to do nothing. The extra costs would include: extended float costs from extended value dates, increased transaction and error resolution costs, etc.

Bas Rebel from PWC wondered whether SEPA might turn out to be a non-event like Y2K. While Marco Schumann from Akzo Noel believes that 'SEPA is the enabler for a global payments and collections hub'. He asks 'Ever dreamt in a multi-billion EUR company to manage only one external EUR account for payments and collections?'

---

SEPA, as always, is seen as an opportunity and a threat. However, if you have to, you really really have to, doing nothing is an option: the payments would continue to flow, but it will cost you, maybe big time.