Single Euro Payments Area 6th annual progress report

The European Central Bank has published its 6th report on the progress of SEPA the first to be made after the launch of SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) scheme in January 2008.

The ECB is pleased to report on considerable progress implementing SEPA but there are some objectives that need to be achieved quickly to keep up the momentum of which two really stand out IMHO

1) The ECB would like an additional pan European scheme to emerge to fulfil the needs of the Card Framework (personally I would like a few trillion dollars in my bank account the only difference between these two requests being that apparently the ECB have a serious expectation that their wishes will be met – it was a big ask to start with and in the current climate it is harder to see any of the likely potential consortia finding the cash or focus to do the job properly)

2) Clarification between the banking sector and the competition authorities on the various interbank pricing models for SEPA direct Debit. (Smart money is on SDD being 2011 at the earliest and not 2010 partly because of this)