Around 200,000 European credit transfers with a total value of 1.36 billion euros. This is the figure recorded by SIA-SSB at the close of the first week of processing of credit transfers compliant with the new SEPA standards (Single Euro Payments Area) which, as of last Monday, sees the participation of banks in the 27 European Union countries, in addition to Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
In particular, over 100 banks from all around Europe exchanged the new SCTs (SEPA Credit Transfer) thanks to SIA-SSB's technology infrastructures, guaranteeing their clientele the processing of payments in euros with the same procedures, conditions and in the same time (maximum 3 days), for both domestic and cross-border transactions.
Since the launch date, the number of daily transactions has been growing steadily, and the highest number of transactions was recorded yesterday, Thursday 31 January, when there were over 64,000 credit transfers with a total value of nearly 590 million euros.
According to two studies carried out respectively by the European Central Bank and the European Union, SEPA will produce significant positive effects, with savings that could top 123 billion euros over the next six years. A further 238 billion euros could be added to this figure should SEPA also be used for electronic invoicing.
SIA-SSB has created an innovative technology platform (Shared Platform) to process the new SCTs.
This solution is used both by EBA Clearing with STEP2, the first and only pan-European clearing house (PE-ACH) for retail payments in euros to which SIA-SSB is the technological partner, and by SIA-SSB for the operations of Italian banks within SEPA.
"The results achieved at the close of the first week since the official roll-out of SEPA are undoubtedly of great significance for a company like SIA-SSB, which in collaboration with EBA Clearing, has been investing in this strategic project since 2002 with the design and development of an innovative platform for the management of SEPA payments and collections, on which all European banks can now carry out their payments processing" - commented Renzo Vanetti, CEO of SIA-SSB. "We are only just setting out on a journey that will lead banks to the gradual adoption of the new European instruments. In this context of change, our role at the service of banks is decisive, both in terms of support in the migration to the new pan-european instruments, minimizing the cost and organizational impacts during the "duality" period, and above all for the development of new value-added services, permitting the business opportunities deriving from SEPA to be seized. Sepa Credit Transfer is operative, and we are already working alongside our clients on Sepa Direct Debit in anticipation of the future launch of this service".
In 2007, SIA-SSB managed 6.4 billion transactions, of which 3.7 billion were credit/debit card operations and 2.7 billion were payments and collections.
The total number of cards managed has exceeded 60 million - clear confirmation of the growing use of this payment instrument by consumers, producing a greater number of transactions on ATM and POS - with over one million merchants.
As far as financial markets are concerned, SIA-SSB managed 73 million deals and 25 million daily messages. Over 150 Italian and foreign brokers have used the fixed income trading platforms and more than 60 domestic and international operators have adopted the MiFID compliance and surveillance solutions.
Over 10 terabytes of data (10 thousand billion bytes) were carried on SIAnet, the multi-service broadband network, guaranteeing infrastructure availability of 99.99%.