Volante Technologies, a global leader in the provision of financial data integration tools, today launched its SEPA Accelerator. The Accelerator tool box comprises all the components - conversion tables, mapping of the many payment formats, etc. - to provide complete support for all SEPA message standards that are needed by financial institutions and corporates for the mandatory adoption of SEPA for SCT (credit transfers) and SDD (direct debits).

Support for and conversion of multiple standards
The SEPA Accelerator includes support for the multiple standards that may be required for data integration purposes and transformation such as, ISO 20022, CGI, IDOC, SWIFT FIN MT 1xx, 2xx, 9xx series, EDIFACT and also supports varying volumes and preferred connectivity routes via SWIFTNet, SAP FSN or EBICS. Inevitably, many organizations will as well internally represent transfers and direct debits in their own proprietary data structures and therefore support for XML, CSV, FixedWidth and COBOL copybook is also provided within the Accelerator.  

The Accelerator also offers the flexibility to support internal translation of legacy ACH standards and proprietary data structures out to both internal applications and external entities.  In order to further ease migration to SEPA, the Accelerator features built-in transformation capabilities from SWIFT FIN messages MT1xx, 2xx and 9xx into SEPA compliant XML and vice a versa, which enables near off-the-shelf adoption for organizations currently using SWIFT FIN messages for Euro payments. 

For direct debit mandate conversion, Volante will contine to work with their existing partners to carryout any mandate conversion and renewal processes.

Implementation
The Accelerator eliminates the need for hand-coding; a typically complex and lengthy process, so project times and costs are typically cut by fifty percent or more.  Furthermore, message creation for notification and data management functions, such as validation, data cleansing and updates to databases, can be automatically generated for any platform when using the Accelerator. Volante work direct with each bank or corporate using their SEPA Accelerator tool box.

The time taken for compliance conversions vary depending upon the set up in each company. Typically, a company already sending and receiving their payments via SWIFT MT101 messages would take less than a month to complete the conversion to SEPA ISO message formats. Similarly, for a company using SAP message formats would also take less than a month as Volante has a vast library of SAP formats from their work on SAP’s FSN network. Companies using proprietary payment formats can expect the conversion, which is more complex, to take about two months, which would still meet the 1st February 2014 deadline if they started soon.

Volante is offering SEPA Accelerator three packages: for SMEs, for mid-sized MNCs and for global MNCs.

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As each week passes, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the costs of SEPA non-compliance will be much higher than most predicted. Volante’s SEPA Accelerator might be your last chance to achieve compliance and avoid these non-compliance costs.