Atos Worldline, the European expertise of Atos Origin in electronic payments and transactions, launches a new solution that eases adoption of the SEPA Direct Debit scheme (SDD) for European corporations and banks, and that can easily be integrated into the existing IT systems. The launch of the Worldline European Mandate and Direct Debit management solution (EMD2) represents a significant milestone in the company's continuing development of cost-effective service solutions that meet clients' needs in order to comply with the latest regulations and to reduce time to market for the introduction of new product and services.
SEPA Direct Debit, a part of the overall Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) initiative, is the payment instrument and scheme that will progressively replace currently existing domestic direct debit schemes as of November 2009. In order to stay competitive, European Corporations and Banks will have to implement solutions that will help them to smoothly migrate towards this new SEPA Direct Debit scheme.
"While the current economic situation has quite an impact on budgets for new projects, transactional services such as the Worldline European Mandate and Direct Debit management solution offer an interesting "Pay per Use" business model to minimize up-front investment, reduce operational risk, foster compliance and increase competitive advantage," declares Claude France, Executive Vice President in charge of Business Marketing & Strategy at Atos Worldline.
This solution, fully compliant with EPC (European Payment Council) guidelines for B2B, B2C and e-mandates can easily and transparently be integrated into the clients' existing information systems. It enables European corporations to facilitate the migration to SEPA Direct Debit by reducing the impact on existing IT systems and processes, and therefore enabling them to reach more rapidly the benefits of SEPA.
The Worldline European Mandate and Direct Debit management solution (EMD2) is based on a central mandate database on which existing Creditor's mandates data can be easily imported and enriched with IBAN and BIC codes. It manages the full mandate lifecycle including Unique Mandate Reference (UMR) generation, dematerialization of new paper mandates and archiving. It can also generate SEPA compliant direct debit instructions based on existing domestic formats, route SDD's towards several creditor banks, notify debtors and manage R-transactions (reversals, refunds, rejects, returns).
The solution can be customised and white labelled to creditor banks willing to offer this high value added service to their corporate clients. On the debtor side, it can be fully integrated with the banks' home and corporate banking, where it provides a comprehensive self-service interface to debtors to enter signed mandate data, manage mandates and collections, and customise controls, alerts and blocking rules.
The Worldline European Mandate and Direct Debit Management solution paves the way for a complete e-Mandate solution encompassing acceptance, routing, authentication and validation, thus enabling new payment usages on the internet.