Are you SEPA compliant for 1st August deadline day?

With just under 2 weeks to go until the 1st August SEPA Go Live deadline, and keeping in mind the ECB SEPA Statistics for May 2014, there is no doubt that the 6 month deadline extension was absolutely essential. But collectively UK organisations are not quite 100% SEPA compliant. We are guessing that any outstanding SEPA implementations at this point will have met with some kind of major unexpected road block that has prevented SEPA compliance 6 months after the official SEPA deadline.

If you are in the process of either starting (perhaps a ‘mini’ implementation) or wrapping up any other SEPA implementation we recommend having a look at the following posts:

• IBAN & BIC - the Definitive Guide
• SEPA Credit Transfers
• SEPA Direct Debits

But at this last juncture you may not have enough time/resources to change, test and deploy significant system changes such as:

• Changing your source ERP system to handle BIC and IBAN requirements
• Generating the required XML format for either SEPA Payments and/or SEPA Direct Debits
• Testing the generated XML formats with your banks and making any necessary changes in time

Add to this, the summer holiday period. We should not under-estimate the impact of going live with SEPA processing in the middle of the summer holidays. Your SEPA go live is likely to be impacted by the holiday period:

• Key project team members in your organisation or at your partner bank maybe on holiday
• Your end users who run the daily payments and or direct debit collections processes may not be available, and so you may temporarily lose valuable knowledge of the day to day process
• Your Treasury team may who will see SEPA credit and debits on the bank statement may also be understaffed, and may not know what to look out for.

If you are concerned that your organisation is not going to be SEPA compliant on deadline day please contact our experienced team of SEPA payment implementation specialists.