In Hans Orga's excellent webinar, 'The SEPA deadline is quickly approaching: Fast track your SEPA migration' on 4 July, Ernes Zelen from PWC's Netherlands office, talked about the PwC survey of SEPA corporate readiness:

• in January they found that 55% of respondents expected to not be ready, whilst in June, this had dropped to 30%
• system readiness is the most mentioned project risk, but the highest risk is the underestimate of business impact
• although 20-40% of corporates have installed new SEPA compliant system versions, there are 20-30% who are still investigating system readiness (PwC believe such companies need to look at backup systems and services to be covered)
• over last year some 30% of corporates have changed their focus from exploiting SEPA efficiency opportunities to purely aiming for compliance including:
  • adapting bank account structures to SEPA ready
  • adapting current payment processes
  • upgrading their systems (ERP, TMS, payment factories) to be SEPA-ready
• the SEPA efficiency play will be left till after 1 Feburary 2014 when they plan to:
  • optimise their bank account structures
  • introduce better cash flow forecasting
  • improve reconciliation rates, and standardise payment and collection procedures
  • rationalise business processes.

In their SEPA work over the last year, PwC have found that some of the common issues for corporates are:

• concern that banks may not be able to handle the new SEPA payment volumes and also may not have the facilities to test properly their corporate clients files
• various direct debit B2B mandate problems
• reconciliation may become a problem because the bank may not pass on all the reference information
• some legacy formats may remain, and if corporates keep the old reporting formats, they can become locked-in to a bank(s)
• some ERP systems may not be ready in time and backup solution(s) may be needed.

PwC and their clients are developing strategic short cuts to help ensure they make the February 2014 deadline including using SDD Core only, and mandate migration strategies, e.g. sending out paper replacement mandates only to highest risk clients and waiting until 2015 when direct debit e-mandates are expected, etc.