At the Eurofinance Conference in Frankfurt on 18 March senior managers at the ECB and the European Payments Council repeated that the EU is determined that the February 2014 launch date will be implemented. The date will not be allowed to slip.

However, there are significant problems at the state of preparedness. The ECB in their SEPA Migration Report, issued on 21 March, reported:

• "most corporations have already completed the planning phase and know what SEPA will mean for them in practical terms. However, when it comes to the actual implementation, a number of companies have adopted very late internal deadlines, even as far as to the end of 2013. This is a source of concern in particular when it comes to the migration to the SEPA direct debit scheme. More worryingly, Small and Medium Enterprises' (SMEs) and local public administrations' awareness of SEPA is still fragmented and the level of preparedness is rather poor."

And these findings were confirmed at the Eurofinance Conference where only 4/5 of the 110 corporates attending had started their SCT migration implementation project and even less had started their SDD project.

This reflects the conversations on the web which showed that:

• migrating legacy direct debit mandate to the SEPA Direct Debit system is proving to be a major problem:
  • a complete set of country procedures is not easy to obtain
  • it is not clear where it is sensible to use the retail Core DD mandate and where to use the B2B mandate
• corporates are, even now, asking each other
  • which bank(s) they should use for SEPA migration
  • is there a way to monitor the progress and offerings of the banks as they prepare for SEPA deadlines?

Assistance in DD management is coming from the new MyBank online payment system which will enable users to create, modify and cancel e-mandates for SEPA Core Direct Debits. Other SDD mandate management services are becoming available, but the problem is converting the existing legacy DD mandates.

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This is a serious mess, but nowhere near as serious as the state of the euro given the recent euro bailout agreement with Cyprus.