Thanks to this agreement, SIA-SSB will provide the Italian Banking Community and their customers with a SEPA compliant infrastructure complemented with further ancillary services such as format conversion to facilitate a smooth migration from the current domestic payments to the new European instruments. To date, SIA-SSB is the only SEPA compliant CSM in Italy.

Through the partnership with EBA Clearing, SIA-SSB is in a unique position to offer CSM SEPA compliant processing services (initially Credit Transfers and then Direct Debits) sharing the existing technical platform of EBA CLEARING's STEP2/PEACH.

This "Shared Platform" approach will allow SIA-SSB customers as well as EBA Clearing Banks to benefit from a solid and reliable infrastructure for processing payments with unmatched opportunities for considerable economies of scale, from a single gate as an entry point for all services for any euro area counterparts and from full distribution capability within Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).
At the same time, this platform will ensure a high flexibility, allowing banks to maintain access to the two settlement systems, TARGET and EURO1, minimizing the cost and organizational complexity and to choose the most suitable access networks, SIANet or SWIFTNet.