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Scary SEPA stories from the 2013 International Payments Summit conference

Once a year ICBI organises a conference on the payment systems industry in Europe. It is a huge, prestigious event and this year SEPA formed a major part of the timetable. There were many bankers and corporate treasurers speaking, scary stories from these sessions included:

  • Pierre Petit, deputy director general, payments and market infrastructure for the European Central Bank (ECB), believes that overall the migration process is going "relatively smoothly" with the notable exception of SDDs, where migration had hardly begun (He's not been reading the LinkedIn SEPA forum discussions or seen the Eurofinance research on how many corporates have not even started.)
  • there is a distinct possibility that the uneven progress of migration across both EU member states and individual companies that some payments could be rejected when the 1 February 2014 migration end date arrives
  • corporates of all types and sizes are having trouble in implementing SEPA Direct Debits, e.g. Telecom Italia, are finding that the many different operations within the group makee the introduction of SDDs a real challenge
  • payment rejection rates are rising as the SEPA migration end date approaches. In some cases, rejection rates have risen to more than 15%, and this is expected to continue over the near term according to one bank
  • banks are preparing themselves for the fact that the full migration of SDDs will not be completed in the next 10 months. They are now saying that some countries may need to offer a grace period, so the process can be completed, just as Finland did when the country moved to SCTs.

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