Olli Kähkönen, Nordea started his presentation by describing the spirit and philosophy of SEPA beautifully, namely: realizing benefits form global standards, end-to-end automation, common collaboration, from complexity to simplicity. He finished saying the issue for banks and corporates is 'Where to start?' acknowledging how much there is to do, e.g. Belgium, which is the leading SEPA country still only has 58% SEPA Credit Transfers and 12-15% SEPA Direct Debits.

Then many of the unresolved problems, issues and opportunities in SEPA and SEPA Direct Debits emerged during the rest of his talk and the presentation by Karen Flinspach (Citi) and Garry Young (Logica) on implementing SEPA and SDD:

• half the corporates in room were in the process of implementing SEPA while rest had still to start which Garry pointed out is dangerous as resources and support for SEPA migration are going to become increasingly scarce
• variations between banks use of XML standard is a problem, e.g. one corporate had five banks each using different versions of XML
• many banks have still not decided whether they be offering both SDD core AND the SDD B2B services, and many corporates, not surprisingly, have not decided which SDD service to use
• SEPA niche payment schemes are definitely going to be allowed, but we cannot be sure which. Many are betting on Italy's RIBA being allowed
• using the SAP 'patch' to prepare for migrating to SEPA payment systems is not enough, SEPA migration requires much, much more
• in migrating to SDD corporates are going to have to choose whether to: do the work completely in-house, outsource just the migration work or completely outsource the whole process? (JL: I got an impression that many companies are taking the last option just because it is so much work.)

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My overall conclusions from this session were: 1) that SEPA still has several unresolved issues; 2) SEPA migration is a huge project. Companies will need a bank and a third party working together; and 3) if I had any spare cash, I'd invest it in third party processors providing SEPA migration services - they are going to clean up.