Sibos 2009 - Tuesday

After having survived the typhoon, the real business of Sibos has started: debating the key issues facing banks and their corporate customers.

SEPA migration is still a key topic with its implications for potential Asian payments consolidation. Many of the delegates to whom I have spoken have expressed the feeling that we are still talking about the same problems that we were at past Sibos conferences.

Has the debate really moved on? Yes and no. We are now that much closer to the SEPA Direct Debit start date and the banks are, quite justifiably, congratulating themselves on the completion of the their compliance projects. But we are still no nearer to having an end date to aim for despite the efforts of the ECB to restart the debate.

At a session on the preparedness of corporates for SEPA Direct Debits the challenges were outlined quite clearly. 45% of businesses require systems development and 30% stated a lack of demand as a reason not to spend scarce resources.

I wonder whether the problem with SEPA is that each country is trying to replace existing payment systems with exact, SEPA-compliant versions, leading to variations which drive up the complexity and drive down the harmonisation. If SEPA and the PSD had been developed as a single alternative to legacy payments and imposed more strongly, there might have been less debate and much more agreement on the solution needed.

This is the way that UK Faster Payments has been developed in the UK and according to Mark Hale from PricewaterhouseCoopers this will take a sizable share of the UK domestic clearing volumes in the near future.

Perhaps, when Asia learns the lessons of SEPA it choose to develop the new payment systems as value-added alternatives unhampered by legacy considerations and therefore won't need an enforced end date as customers will want to migrate.