Shops doing business in Europe, whether brick and mortar or virtual, have a new option for payment – a SaaS offering of Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).
The new service comes courtesy of a partnership between MSP Clearstream Services IT and payments vendor EastNets.
“It combines Clearstream Services' market-trusted IT capabilities in managing complex and secure ICT infrastructures and EastNets' long-standing payments expertise to efficiently deliver a quality solution, reliably and in the shortest timeframe,” the companies explained.
SEPA as a service could fill a critical gap as not all are prepared to handle this new payments standard.
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According to the European Payment Council and the European Central Bank, small and medium-size financial institutions are unprepared for SEPA. Nonetheless, SEPA is making its inexorable move across Europe, forcing these institutions to catch up. Companies are facing a February 2014 deadline to be in compliance.
By using a SaaS approach, it should be faster and easier for shops to meet the compliance deadline of next winter. Instead of taking months to craft and implement a SEPA solution the traditional way, the partner’s SaaS tool shortens this to just a few weeks, the companies argue.
“EastNets' XML payment messaging hub, en.PaymentSafe, efficiently transforms, validates and automates payment flows from back office to the SEPA market infrastructure for both SEPA credit transfer and direct debit workflow in compliance with EPC rulebooks. Customers also benefit from the very high levels of virtual and physical security provided by Clearstream Services IT who fully hosts and manages this unique technology solution in its secure datacenters in Luxembourg,” the partners said. “The messaging hub also processes other payment messages flows such as SWIFT MT for foreign currencies.”The new service will be shown off next week in Dubai.
"Our SEPA in SaaS solution is designed to coexist seamlessly with a range of other on-demand financial services from the well-established EastNets and Clearstream Services IT team. Services include Anti-money laundering (AML) filtering and profiling and financial transaction reporting based on en.SafeWatch. Customers can also integrate these with Clearstream Services IT's SWIFT Service Bureau, providing connectivity capabilities developed in-house by one of the top 10 SWIFT users worldwide," the partners explained.
Not the First
The EastNets/Clearstream offering is not the first SEPA SaaS. European company Carphone Warehouse is using a SaaS SEPA solution from Automic and says it will beat the February deadline for its debt collection.
Not only will the SaaS speed migration to SEPA, Carphone Warehouse says it will drive down debit failures by some 90 percent.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
