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PS here's the link to the announcement of the abolition of fiscale zegels

http://minfin.fgov.be/portail1/nl/presse/timbres_fiscaux_nl.pdf

I guess you were driving on a Belgian plate and not a Finnish one - it's a long drive to Brussels via Vilnius. Otherwise it would count as very royal to even try to pay the ticket: there is £20 million outstanding in Westminster alone on unpaid fines for non-UK vehicles so please come and park your car anywhere here: we need the money. The old payment method was abolished in Belgium in 2007 of taking a tear-off portion of the ticket to the post office and buying 'tax stamps' (fiscale zegels), that's how I paid the fine on my Renault 5 in 19nn: I think they accepted cash, Mistercash or postage stamps, maybe even local luncheon vouchers as these were centrally issued at that time. Now the tear off strip is a form for an 'overschrijving' with the payee's reference code in MICR: you have to have a local bank account to use it. The traditional UK method of reacting to this frustration would be to write a cheque on a slab of concrete and throw it through the parking authority's window. The slab is hard to run through the cheque truncation machines, though, and this is why cheques are slated for abolition in 2018. Conclusions? Solutions? By which I mean solutions that have some realistic chance of coming to fruition. You were lucky that the parking authority did not suffer a charge at its bank, since the payment was cross-border, requiring you to make a second payment to clear off your balance: that shows that although SEPA has not fully happened, some progress on PSD and on Reg2560/2001 aka Reg 924/2009 is noticeable. I would say that was good news and we should all feel a lot happier.

The ECB doesn't want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing they need. They don't even want the presents underneath the Christmas Tree. They just want a SEPA Zone, full of cards and ISO: what more can we do? Actually that's the question being posed in the ICBI SEPA Conference in Brussels next week...

Hi Jonathan - how would you characterise the SEPA Direct Debit scheme in this regard, where the mandate is created by the creditor (the originator) through its scheme-adhering bank within the EU, and all current accounts in the eurozone are now reachable as debit accounts by EU Directive 924/2009?

A public survey which only had 98 respondents - not all being corporates - can hardly claim that its findings about corporates are authoritative. It would further undermine its authority if any of the respondents turned out either to be in the finance departments of the sponsors or to be participants in the EBAM or E&I services - for which the survey is a market stimulation exercise. Lastly it is hard to assess a statement that "68% of corporates would consider switching banks for better..on-boarding", when on-boarding is itself the process of switching banks. There is a certain circularity about that claim; does it mean that they intend to switch banks for the fun - or rather lack of fun - of it?

Dear Bob - good post :) Not having attended the event, it would interest me to know how the market penetration of SEPA products was characterised at the event. I have seen a market penetration figure for Italy of 30% for example, but I do not know if an Italian consumer or treasurer would recognise the resulting services as either being in themselves - or being based on - SEPA products. Even if the bank-to-bank piece is using the SEPA Data Model/formats plus some AOS, is it not quite conceivabe that the service that is projected through by the bank to the user is perceived by the user as a legacy service with the one or other added feature, plus PSD compliance and some price/terms improvement? I would have thought this a more likely scenario than a direct purchase by end users of SEPA products in preference to legacy ones. There was, though, discussion specifically related to Italy that only the SCT could be used for an 'on behalf of' payment in a Shared Services context and in a manner that satisfied local AML requirements, whilst the legacy product had no field for indicating the Payer Information of the underlying subsidiary.. and that that this function in the SCT would cause a big uptake in SCT usage for national payments. Interested in your view. Bob

Yes, Nick, exactly right, the National Girobank, commissioned by Viscount Stansfield (aka Tony Benn) when he was Postmaster General. Next move should be to integrate the mobile banking value chain by acquiring a major telecomms name like BT... in place of strife like what we see between these sectors these days.

Dear Bo - to what extent will the final report lay out the nature of the two barriers mentioned in your post (i) digital certification and (ii) recognition for VAT? And then the further detail on:

• their impact and on whom
• what should be done and by when to eliminate that
• who has to make what contribution to the objective
• what happens if they are not overcome? 

Just one question for clarification - in what part of PSD are 'Additional Optional Services' specifically mentioned?

Presumably Tieto, having taken such a prominent position as experts in eInvoicing, will be able to handle this matter as eDischarging - ePi45 to the redundee, and then weekly eUb40s online from the redundee to the eJobCentre to warrant that they have been available and fit for eWork, but have done no eWork, and that their circumstances are the same as at the time of the last eClaim.