EBA Clearing announced at the EBAday conference in Helsinki today that the Company is implementing a Step2 Card Clearing Service for a go-live in April 2015.
The new STEP2 service will be based on the SEPA Card Clearing Framework developed by the Berlin Group, a group of 27 major players in the card industry from 25 countries in and beyond the Eurozone; the aim of the Berlin Group is to standardise card clearing across Europe by leveraging SEPA infrastructure.
The service has been developed at the request of a group of major German banks who have agreed to be the launching community of the STEP2 Card Clearing Service. The banks will use the STEP2 Card Clearing Service for clearing payments related to pre-authorised card transactions in line with the specifications of the German GIROCARD scheme.
The new pan-European service on EBA CLEARING's euro retail payment platform will enable user banks to leverage their XML infrastructure and to re-use the interfaces and bank-internal systems they have put in place for the STEP2 SEPA Direct Debit Services.
The service is open to all banks and EBA CLEARING invites all banks wishing to take advantage of the new service to express their interest.