After several months of testing, the new CEC CSM began live operations on February 22nd 2013. The migration was completed on March 26th 2013 with all operations transiting the new infrastructure. This migration completes a year-long project which fulfilled all its milestones according to the initial plan.

The project was supported by Accenture which helped the banks to select the vendors and messaging solution and helped facilitate and manage the project.

16 direct participants and 55 indirect participants are now exchanging the different payment instruments via STET with an average daily volume of 4 million operations. One week after the end of the migration, the highest peak day of the CEC/UCV has been exceeded with 13 911 871 operations processed on April 2nd 2013.

For the Belgian community, this architecture allows the domestic community to share operational costs and future development costs with the French community and potentially new STET communities, while retaining full governance over its system and full control over domestic needs.

The model illustrates the first sizeable technical platform shared between different communities. In the current environment of very progressive move to SEPA, the expected consolidation of CSMs is yet to become reality. The Belgian architecture illustrates an alternate route to reaping the benefits of an integrated European market whilst payment instruments progressively converge.

Tom Van Der Biest, BNP Paribas Fortis and chairman of the program Steering Committee, stated: "Through this migration, Belgium once again confirms its forerunner position in SEPA as it is the first community to fully complete the move from the domestic infrastructure to a European platform. The project was completed without the slightest impact on the Belgian economy or any of its actors.
We are very happy with the way that this extremely important, systemic and strategic project was completed and are impressed by the high professissionalism shown by STET and all participants to the project.”


Jean-Pic Berry, CEO of STET, added: "We are highly satisfied to see the successful and timely completion of this project, crucial both for the Belgian banking community and for STET. This success owes largely to the very pragmatic and professional management of the project by the Belgium banks. It also marks the first step towards the consolidation of the European payment market. We are confident that more European communities will join our Multi-CSM platform in the coming years”

“We are convinced that this landmark move to a European CSM platform indeed reaffirms Belgian banking’s leading role at the forefront of payments processing innovation in Europe” said Baudouin Thomas, Accenture Managing Director Financial Services Belux. “Accenture is proud to have supported in designing this central clearing and settlement mechanism and executing the migration on time. The successful delivery of this important initiative was only possible thanks to the commitment and ingenuity of the different organizations involved.”