EBA Clearing has added an enhanced remittance information service for single euro payment area (SEPA) credit transfers to its pan-European clearinghouse platform STEP2.
The new service comes as a response to demand from corporates, and allows for inclusion of up to 999 structured invoice and credit note references in each individual SEPA credit transfer.
It is designed to support bundling of a large number of invoices and credit notes in to one payment, and to allow for easier reconciliation for the party receiving the payment.
The additional optional service, named AOS2, was initially activated by eight participant banks, and is scheduled to be rolled out in five additional institutions.
Laura Hänninen, treasury manager at Sanoma Corporation, said: “The fact that our customers can now put much more structured remittance data into one SEPA transaction will help to increase automation rates on both ends of the process and further bring down our reconciliation cost.”
She added: “As a front running consumer media and learning company in Europe, with customers and suppliers in several SEPA countries, we welcome this new service and the optimisation potential it offers at a European scale.”
Olli Savolainen, head of cash management corporates and institutions for Finland at Danske Bank, said: “This means that a growing number of corporates in Finland and SEPA can benefit from nearly unlimited remittance data capacity for their ISO 20022-compliant payments.”
The new service is available to all STEP2 participant banks offering SEPA credit transfers and direct debits to their customers in the single euro payments area. This amounts to around 4,800 financial institutions in 34 countries.
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