The system was delivered and customer testing commenced in June 2007, well ahead of the 2008 SEPA deadline.

This early delivery will allow the bank to complete its comprehensive testing and integration with its own systems in a timely fashion. This enables the bank to go to market with a SEPA capability ahead of its competitors, facilitating the capture of new business from the emerging SEPA payments market.

The system provides full support for all requirements defined by the SEPA rulebooks - both for SEPA Credit Transfers and SEPA Direct Debits. LAPS High Volume offers EBA STEP 2 and other European CSM connectivity as well as multi-bank capabilities which provide a sound platform for the provisioning of Additional Optional Services (AOS).

Scalability of the new platform is crucial when full SEPA migration is completed by the end of 2010. Banks need to be sure that their SEPA solution scales in line with the business volume predicted for SEPA .LAPS High Volume has been benchmarked at sustained rate of 20 million transactions per hour to fulfill this need.

Jerry Norton, director strategy, global financial services at LogicaCMG commented: "The imposition of SEPA and the standardization that it brings provides a clear opportunity and a business case for the rationalization of retail payments processing. This allows the retail payment business to catch up with the rationalization of wholesale and international payments processing which has been underway for some years. LogicaCMG now has an offering in LAPS to address all payments processing irrespective of the value, source or type of payment."