SEPA, More Than Just a Compliance Issue for Banks

BOSTON, Mass. - October 02, 2007 - Over 60 percent of payment professionals expect their payments business to look different by 2010, according to an industry snapshot on SEPA from SAP. This finding comes from respondents who believe the Payment Service Directive (PSD) and SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) are catalysts for industry change that will provide business opportunities for standardizing their payment systems.

The snapshot also revealed that 39 percent of European banks will have a single enterprise-wide payments hub by 2010 to build standardized interfaces to other systems to support all payment types. On the other hand, 48 percent will implement a shared platform for their payments business that will link together SEPA payment on a common infrastructure, but still maintain some separation.

This is an industry snapshot involving 90 bank representatives across 13 eurozone countries, six non-eurozone EU members and Norway, conducted by financial news service Finextra, together with the SEPA Consultancy and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP).

Other key findings include:

Thirty-seven percent of respondents have yet to fully map out the implications of SEPA for their corporate customers, as they are still formulating their own strategies.
More than 93 percent of respondents will have signed the SEPA Credit Transfer Adherence Agreement by January 2008. To support SEPA credit transfers, almost 87 percent of banks say they will be adopting the new XML message types; however, 32 percent will only use this for interbank transfers only. This finding suggests there is a lack of demand from corporations for the banks to support the XML message types, which can be due to a lack of awareness about SEPA from many corporations.
Over 15 percent of payment professionals don’t understand the implications of PSD, but the majority of respondents agreed that the Payment Services Directive is a catalyst for industry change. The remainder of the respondents (24 percent) sees the PSD as a “tick box” requirement for achieving SEPA compliance.

“This snapshot of SEPA revealed that the nature of payments needs to change by 2010, but there still remains the uncertainty and inconsistency across the industry on how this change is going to happen,” said Marc Derungs, vice president Banking, SAP AG. ”An overall theme heard from the results is that the current payment systems are disparate – creating inefficiencies. Integrated payment systems can alleviate this challenge and not only support SEPA compliance, but provide new and upcoming business opportunities.”

Note: To receive the full findings please contact Andrea Robillard at andrea.robillard@sap.com.

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Contacts:
Andrea Robillard, SAP +49 (6227) 7-43933, andrea.robillard@sap.com, CET
Anthony Suarez, Burson-Marsteller +1 212 614 4331, anthony.suarez@bm.com, EDT