LogicaCMG gets EBA Clearing Sepa certification

The leading private provider of euro clearing services, EBA CLEARING has certified LogicaCMG LAPS High Volume for supporting the EBA's STEP2 SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) and SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) services.

LAPS High Volume provides an integrated international SEPA payments processing framework that meets the needs for both SEPA compliance and migration and enables compliance with the Payments Services Directive. The EBA services make full use of the ISO20022 standards for message formats and comply with the EPC's SEPA rulebooks.

Sarah Loveday, Managing Director Global Products at LogicaCMG explains: "Implementing LAPS High Volume allows our customers to provide SEPA-compliant credit transfer services from day one and despite the delays in the implementation of SEPA Direct Debits, we believe the early certification of our SEPA Direct Debits solution is a clear advantage. This facilitates the early proving of SEPA Direct Debit services, allowing our customers to be best-positioned to rule the new SEPA market and turn the SEPA initiative into a true and long-term business opportunity.

"Unlike SEPA Credit Transfers, SEPA Direct Debits presents a more significant challenge for the banking industry - primarily because of vast differences amongst existing legacy types of Direct Debit services in the individual countries."

EBA CLEARING was established in June 1998 by 52 major European and international banks with the mission to own and operate the EURO1 large-value payment system.

In addition to the standard benefits from LAPS High Volume, the SEPA version offers the following:

• Support for current schemes: LAPS High Volume supports existing national Credit Transfer and Direct Debit schemes as well as BIC and IBAN in many European countries.
• SEPA scheme compliancy: LAPS High Volume is SEPA compliant for SCT, SDD and the R-series messages now, making it a proven and stable environment for a bank's SEPA mass payment processing.
• Mandate management: LAPS High Volume already supports the Creditor Mandate Flow (CMF) scheme from the current EPC rulebooks providing a sound basis for potential Additional Optional Services (AOS) and also the alternative mandate flow schemes which are currently being ratified by the EPC (and will be defined in future issues of the rulebooks).
• Clearing and Settlement support: LAPS High Volume already interfaces to a number of Clearing and Settlement Mechanisms (CSMs) in Europe including, for SEPA, EBA STEP 2 (a PE-ACH) and bi-lateral arrangements and can do so in a single instance of the system.
• Routing support: LAPS High Volume provides routing mechanisms that allow the appropriate CSM to be chosen for an individual transaction, distinguishing between in-house, ACH/PE-ACH and bi-lateral routes and accounting for the transactions appropriately.