For the thousands of financial establishments operating in the euro zone and for their corporate customers, Synchrony Payment Hub helps to simplify cross-border euro processing for higher levels of service that banks can provide to their corporate, merchant and consumer clients.

The SEPA project is an effort by the European Payments Council to make sure euro payments in the euro zone are treated as domestic payments, eliminating the current differentiation between national and cross-border payments. To do so, financial institutions are faced with updating IT systems to replace manual processes with automatic, streamlined approaches. A new release of the Rule Books and Guidelines will detail expectations on how the new payment instruments are to be implemented - in particular, SCT (SEPA Credit Transfer) and SDD (SEPA Direct Debit) - and how the payment systems are evolving.

"The European Payments Council has clearly outlined their expectations for the SEPA program" said Laurent Menard, vice president of financial solutions marketing. "To help financial institutions meet these expectations while cutting costs, we provide Synchrony Payment Hub, which leverages the foundation of our industry-leading technology in internal and business-to-business collaboration (B2B)."

For the SEPA project, Synchrony Payment Hub proposes modules dedicated to the specific requirements of SCT and SDD orders such as collaborative, delivery and compliant processes. Synchrony Payment Hub is a flexible and modular infrastructure for the management of payment flows mainly in a B2B approach. This solution is based on an infrastructure platform with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which calls on the functional or technical services required for dealing with payment flows.

By means of its modular design, Synchrony Payment Hub covers every angle of the SEPA project - collaboration between banks and corporate as well as banks and clearing systems. Also, through dynamic specialcialization, the solution may be extended to support virtually any banking process that requires the secure exchange of sensitive documents and data. This makes it a solution that is designed to last and which promises sustained consolidation for this sector of the banking information system.