At last, a SIBOS where conversation around SEPA is welcome

Not before time Craig and it cant come soon enough.Corporates have been denied for far too long.Lets hope that the rush to the tape is fast and succesful

While it was enunciated a long time back, isn't the basic principle behind SEPA still the same, namely, equalization of fees for domestic and cross-border payment transactions within the EURO zone? It's not surprising that SEPA's threat to reduce their payments fee income would push banks to treat SEPA as a necessary evil. However, shouldn't its converse - the opportunity to cut down overall payment processing costs - provide the required pull effect for corporates? If it lacks business case for both banks and corporates, then I can't help wondering who SEPA is really targeted at.

Now that we have a certain end-date, otherwise known as the start-date, hopefully the agenda will turn to more important matters. On the whole, SEPA makes transactions between € countries more efficient. That's only a part, and possibly a small part, of most corporates needs. How can we resolve the auto-reconciliation of receivables with invoices - a longstanding requirement from corporates. They don't say 'for transactions in €'. They mean all the currencies of the countries with which they import and export.

Needs of corporates will justifiably keep growing with time. But, before loading them into external systems from banks and SEPA as additional requirements, it helps to look inside corporates and see how well their internal systems can cope with such changes in the first place. Having worked with several corporates on ERP and MDM solutions, most of them can't handle auto-reconciliation between their own Sales Orders, Invoices, Delivery Notes and Installation Reports or across their multiple internal channels. For example, when my 3-in-1 printer-scanner-copier device recently failed, I had to call the manufacturer's call center to log a complaint. I had registered the device on the company's website immediately after installing it but the CSR had no record of me or my device (My device was bought a month ago, I have been a registered customer of this company for 10 years). I had to go through the entire process again. The printer's self-diagnostics printout carries a 14-digit serial number but the CSR insisted that I had to give him a 10-digit number only. The moment we sorted this out, my ticket was assigned to another company, which was the manufacturer's authorized service provider. Chaos multiplied at this stage - the same device even had a different model number on this company's system!  

I could go on and on but my point is, corporates can't justifiably demand auto-reconciliation of receipts coming from external systems with internally-generated invoices as a Day One feature from SEPA.