German banks begin migration to EBA Clearing Step2
Over the last two days, two German financial institutions, which will use EBA CLEARING's STEP2 platform for a major part of their SEPA payments in the future, have migrated the first transactions to a processing mode that has been specifically designed for handling very high volumes.
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The banks exchanged SEPA payments via STEP2 that were, among other things, pre-sorted by receiving bank. The batch processing mode used in this context allows a fast and efficient clearing of large payment volumes. Over the next three months, seven major players in the German payments market will migrate their bilateral mass payments to this processing mode on the STEP2 platform.
"The exchange of SEPA Credit Transfers in the batch processing mode between two STEP2 Participants from Germany marks the beginning of a large-scale migration of domestic payments to EBA CLEARING's pan- European platform by German banks," said Gilbert Lichter, Chief Executive Officer, EBA CLEARING. "This successful step shows that our German participants are ready for the migration of national credit transfer and direct debit volumes to the SEPA formats and for the settlement of these payments via a new clearing channel. After long and intense preparations, we are looking forward to tackling this last phase of the SEPA migration in cooperation with the banks."
The use of the pan-European STEP2 platform by the seven banks involved for their national transactions will replace the direct bilateral exchange of these mass payments currently taking place between the individual financial institutions ("Garagenclearing").
EBA CLEARING offers to the European financial industry a clearing infrastructure for SEPA transactions that provides full reach to all payment service providers offering SEPA Credit Transfers and Direct Debits. Furthermore, EBA CLEARING has taken the necessary preparatory steps to ensure that the STEP2 platform meets the high resilience requirements that will apply to systemically important payment systems in the future.