In a paper SEPA looks wonderful, but implementation is lacking. Just in my own experience I run in to difficulty few weeks ago, because SEPA could not deliver the promise. I paid a bill from my belgian online bank to Finland. As in Finland, companies require reference codes for automatic payment settlements. That is good and saves a lot of time/money at the company side. Problem was that when I do SEPA payment from my belgian account, it has a field for reference code, but it is domestic. Now I mean domestic in a sense where payment goes inside Belgium, not whole SEPA region.

So I added my finnish reference code to free text field. Put this makes more manual labor on the recievers side. So I got unpaid bill message from finnish company and then I had to send receipt to confirm my payment. 

This issue is similar that I have raised flag few years ago. That time I got answer from several instances that there will be new ISO 9000 standard, which will take place in near future. But at least when I called few weeks ago several banks in Nordics and mainland of Europe to discuss with this issue, none of the cash management experts could confirm when they start to introduce new reference codes in their online banks.

If you know when most of the banks will update their online bank system to accept universal reference codes, just let me know. Before that I can't advice any big or small company to implement meaning of SEPA and have only one account somewhere in Europe.