From November 2022, EBA Clearing’s pan-European mass payment system will be upgraded to process Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) transactions around the clock, seven days a week, and to provide settlement results to participating banks in minutes.
The planned upgrade will enable STEP2 participants to shorten end-to-end processing timelines for retail payments in euro from hours to minutes, for the benefit of European businesses and consumers.
The concepts of the new tools and capabilities, which leverage existing file-based mechanisms that are embedded into end-to-end processing flows, have been communicated to STEP2 users and their providers.
STEP2 processes on average 55 million SEPA credit transfers and direct debits per day.
The system connects more than 4,800 payment service providers operating in Europe and provides payment reach to end users across the continent.
David Renault, head of STEP2 Services at EBA Clearing, comments: “We are eager to put these brand-new tools into the hands of our large user community, so they can start to fully leverage the continuous gross settlement mechanism we introduced in STEP2 last year. Our users will be able to take advantage of the gains in output speed and availability that the upgraded system will offer and pass these benefits on to their customers.”
Erwin Kulk, head of service development and management at EBA Clearing, says: “Thanks to the STEP2 upgrade, large payment volumes can be reliably processed at near-real-time speed around the clock without any increase in processing costs or significant new investments. This will help payment service providers across Europe focus their available resources and processing capacity for instant payments to those time-critical payments for which merchants and consumers are requesting innovative solutions, for example at the point of sale or in e-commerce.”
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