Since SEPA Project is a hot topic of the moment and BIS has been continuously preoccupied with its evolution, why don’t we first approach this subject?
In June 2009, BIS initiated and hosted in its conference room a series of 3 workshops on SEPA-related matters, gathering around 30 participants from the banking sector and 15 participants representing various companies (from the retail market, pharmaceutical industry, airline transports, etc). We intended these sessions to be less formal than the previous SEPA conferences we have organized and this proved to be a successful idea since the participants were very open to share their views on the current status of SEPA implementation in banks, on the impact that the adoption of SEPA instruments will have on their customers, as well as on other issues such as: settlement landscape, real daily issues they have to face, SEPA deadlines, SEPA benefits and so on.
Here are the handouts used during these workshops.
Consequent to these sessions, we have concluded that the feedback of the Romanian market is:
- Corporates have little information about SEPA and PSD ; however, in order to comply with the payment requests of several of their providers abroad, companies have asked the banks they are working with for certain payment services, but the required services were not part of any banks’ portfolio. After several discussions they realized that the product they need is one of the SEPA instruments, an European direct debit product.
- Most banks are not very eager to adopt the SEPA instruments and they rely on the generous timeframe of Romania’s Euro adoption (planned for 2014), which allegedly leaves them plenty of time for action. In our opinion, both for the banks and their corporate customers, this a decision matter on the future competition landscape they choose to position themselves in.
BIS has been an early bird in complying with SWIFT’s requirements for SEPA. BIS’ application – qPayIntegrator v2.0 – was the first SWIFTReady SEPA certified solution in 2008 and, at the same time, the first Romanian banking solution for the payment systems, which obtains SWIFT’s recognition for its proven compliance with the banking industry standards. For 2009, BIS has renewed its certification, becoming SWIFTReady SEPA 2009. BIS’ services portfolio has also gained SWIFT’s appreciation due to the large area of business competencies covered by our business experts (SWIFT certified consultants for TARGET2, SEPA, Cash Reporting, Securities, TSU, Corporate, CCI and EUCLID), as well as by our technical developers (certified for all the products available in SWIFTAlliance suite).
So, we have the solution, we have the expertise, we are ready for SEPA ! How about teaming to achieve together business excellence?
By: Ioana Guiman