The EPC launches the SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Direct Debit rulebook public consultations

05 April 2016

These public consultations are designed to ensure that the SEPA schemes reflect the evolution of PSPs' needs and those of their customers, as well as technological changes.

As part of the evolution of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Credit Transfer (SCT) scheme, the SEPA Direct Debit Core (SDD Core) and the SDD Business-to-Business (SDD B2B) schemes, and in line with its commitment to stakeholders’ involvement, the EPC launches today the public consultations on possible modifications to these schemes.

A call for suggestions to amend the rulebooks, which are the technical and business rules governing the schemes and to be followed by the scheme participants, ended in December 2015. The EPC has registered nearly 40 change requests from various banking and stakeholder communities, including change requests from the EPC itself. All have been included in the public consultation documents.

Examples of change requests include:

• A recommendation of the Euro Retail Payments Board to make the EPC Customer-to-Bank (C2B) Implementation Guidelines mandatory for SCT and SDD scheme participants.
• In case an SCT originator or an SDD creditor wishes to use these EPC C2B file specifications for its SCT/SDD initiation message files, they will have the certainty that every SCT/SDD scheme participant is technically capable to process their SCT and SDD transactions based on these EPC specifications.

Propositions from payment service users related to the extension of structured and unstructured remittance information, and to the combination of these two types of information in SEPA payment messages. The European Payments Council (EPC) itself suggested making additional information available outside of the SCT/SDD message in the “cloud”. 

Stakeholders wishing to comment on the change requests can fill in the response templates and send them to change-request.epc-scheme@epc-cep.eu, until 4 July 2016.

Full news

SEPA_Credit Transfer Rulebook change request consultation document and response template

SEPA_Direct Debit Core Rulebook change request consultation document and response template

SEPA_Direct Debit Business to Business Rulebook change request consultation document and response template

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