The SEPA directive was designed to simplify and standardize Europe’s electronic payments market – including card payments, credit transfers and direct debits – and ease cross-border processing.
The SEPA’s direct debit scheme is designed to allow companies to conduct cross-border and domestic debit collections in euros using a common interface, infrastructure and set of processes across 32 countries.
Credit Agricole’s new platform will centralize SEPA direct debit collections for bank’s several French regional IT payment systems, and processes payment transactions for many of the group’s banks.
It also enables the company to process high volumes of payments rapidly through a single IT platform and accelerates the time it takes to launch new and greater value-added payment products and services, particularly for the group’s corporate customers.
Accenture Financial Services group senior executive Bao-Viet Le said that specifically, the implementation of the SEPA Direct Debit scheme has been perceived by many banks as being one of the most complex challenges due to its significant differences with existing national schemes.
"CEDICAM was able to implement a common payment platform to handle SEPA direct debits within the compliance deadline, and this new platform is robust enough to also handle the ever-growing volume of other SEPA transactions, including credit transfers, international payments and high-value payments," Viet Le said .
Earlier, Accenture was selected by Credit Agricole in 2009 to help implement the platform, based upon the Open Payment Framework (OPF) solution of Clear2Pay, a payment technology vendor, and to consolidate Credit Agricole’s multiple payment systems.
