The European Automated Clearing House Association, Eacha, has appointed a new Board at its General Assembly meeting, held in Cracow on 11 October.
Mr José Beltrán (STET) has assumed the role of President on the Board of Directors which further consists of Mr Harald Stern (Equens), Mr José-Luis Langa (Iberpay), Mr Corrado Borsatti (ICBPI) and Mr Michal Szymanski (KIR).
Mr Beltrán brings to the role extensive experience, from a career of over 25 years in banking as well as in the retail payments clearing and settlement arena in Europe.
The European Automated Clearing House Association (EACHA) is a non-commercial, cooperation forum, which represents the interests of its members vis-a-vis other industry fora.
EACHA aims:
To be the forum for information sharing between members
To advance the views of its members on issues of general interest to the payment industry
To work on specific issues as when they arise e.g. developing common guidelines for SEPA clearing and settlement
EACHA was formally launched in 2006, since then participation has steadily grown and in 2012 its membership comprises of 25 organizations, payments processors and schemes, from 21 countries. Most recently, BACS (UK) and Latvijas Banka (Latvia) joined. The EACHA is the industry body for the European retail payments clearing organizations.
With the advent of SEPA, EACHA has been actively involved in industry work through contribution to the work of the ECB, the European Commission and the EPC, to ensure the successful implementation of the SEPA.
EACHA has developed and publishes the 'EACHA Interoperability Framework', a set of technical standard supporting the efficient and effective exchange of payments between clearing systems, banks and user communities across Europe, and especially in the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA).