SEPA payments will replace existing payments for all Irish businesses over the next two to three years, and offers benefits such as the ability to Direct Debit customers across the entire Eurozone. A major benefit of the Origix Corporate solution is that businesses can initiate SEPA payments using legacy formats (e.g. Standard18/EMTS). Origix Corporate includes three modules which cover the migration of legacy mandates into the SEPA format, ongoing mandate management and the generation of SEPA Direct Debits and Credit Transfers. One of the key criteria used by AIB when selecting Sentenial was the product's proven track record of meeting the requirements of customers within various size categories, from SME to multi-national corporates.

Diarmuid Hanrahan, Head of Payments and eChannels, AIB Bank said "We want to make a smooth transition from EMTS to SEPA. We are confident that Sentenial's expert knowledge and experience of SEPA migrations in several European countries will ensure the migration of AIB customers to SEPA is a highly successful one."

Sean Fitzgerald, CEO, Sentenial said,"Sentenial is very pleased to partner with AIB on their customer migration to SEPA. AIB is recognised as a leader within the payments industry in Ireland and their initiative in this area shows a great commitment to supporting and assisting their clients. That approach, combined with Sentenial's pan-European SEPA experience is a major step towards Ireland's migration to SEPA".

SEPA was instigated by the European Commission several years ago to provide a single pan-European payments system which would replace the existing domestic payment systems. The European Parliament is currently in the process of setting an "end-date" deadline by which time domestic payments must be decommissioned and migrated to SEPA. It is expected that deadline will be late 2013 or early 2014.