For Sepa, the end is nigh

Well, not quite. But at EBAday in Helsinki there have been many calls for a mandatory end date for Sepa implementation - for a fixed date beyond which legacy national payment products within the eurozone will no longer be supported.

December 2010 was the initial target date set when the Sepa plans were first being formulated by the industry, but this was abandoned when the scale of migration efforts required became apparent. Now it is up to each individual country to decide how long the dual-running process will continue.

At the opening of the conference yesterday, Olli-Petteri Lehtinen, executive vice president and head of corporate merchant banking, Nordea Bank Finland called on the industry to act quickly to reduce uncertainty over length of dual running, pointing out that it was a distraction to offering services to customers. He said he expects that most countries will be announcing end dates after they have transposed the Payments Services Directive (Nov. 1 2009 deadline).

Many other delegates and speakers at the event - bankers and corporates alike - supported the call for quickly resolving the end date issue, as well as for greater involvement of public authorities to help make this happen.

In his closing presentation Jean-Michel Godeffroy, director general for payment systems and market infrastructure at the European Central Bank (ECB) also called for the direct involvement of public authorities, and said that the ECB, the European Commission and the European Payments Council would be getting together over the summer to figure out how best to make this happen.