Volante Technologies, a global leader in the provision of financial data integration tools, today launched its single euro payments area (SEPA) Accelerator.
On the 1st February 2014, Eurozone countries must comply with the new SEPA regulation. For countries outside the Eurozone, focused on the non-Eurozone deadline of 31 October 2016, compliancy is also mandatory, for Euro-denominated credit transfers and direct debit instructions.
The Volante SEPA Accelerator delivers complete support for all SEPA message standards and helps financial institutions and corporates address the challenges associated with the mandatory adoption of SEPA for SCT (credit transfers) and SDD (direct debits).
The SEPA Accelerator includes support for the multiple standards that may be required for data integration purposes and transformation such as, ISO 20022, CGI, IDOC, SWIFT FIN MT 1xx, 2xx, 9xx series, EDIFACT and also supports varying volumes and preferred connectivity routes via SWIFTNet, SAP FSN or EBICS. Inevitably, many organizations will also internally represent transfers and direct debits in their own proprietary data structures and therefore support for XML, CSV, FixedWidth and COBOL copybook is also provided within the Accelerator.
The Accelerator also offers the flexibility to support internal translation of legacy ACH standards and proprietary data structures out to both internal applications and external entities. In order to further ease migration to SEPA, the Accelerator features built-in transformation capabilities from SWIFT FIN messages MT1xx, 2xx and 9xx into SEPA compliant XML and vice a versa, which enables near off-the-shelf adoption for organizations currently using SWIFT FIN messages for Euro payments.
The Accelerator eliminates the need for hand-coding; a typically complex and lengthy process, so project times and costs are typically cut by fifty percent or more. Furthermore, message creation for notification and data management functions, such as validation, data cleansing and updates to databases, can be automatically generated for any platform when using the Accelerator.
Volante has been working with corporates and banks for more than a decade and understands the complexity of migrating to new message standards and business processes. Adherence to SEPA regulation presents many challenges with respect to internal systems, on-boarding banks and corporates and the subsequent ongoing maintenance obligations. The Volante SEPA Accelerator offers dual benefits for corporates who must become compliant and for banks, with the challenge of onboarding non-compliant customers.
Fiona Hamilton, Vice President, EMEA, Volante Technologies, said, "The percentage for SEPA-compliance across credit transfers and direct debits is staggeringly low, particularly for direct debits. Lengthy deadlines and SEPA zone uncertainty, can be held partly to blame for the lack of take-up; but the fact remains that 1 February 2014 is a fast looming deadline and 'wait and see' is no longer a viable option. For corporates that continue to do nothing, transformations services may be provided by their bank for a short period, but only at a cost and which will only ever be a short-term solution."
Hamilton, continued, "We can dramatically speed up compliance rates for all corporates and banks; from those using SAGE and Microsoft QuickBooks to those using SAP and Oracle which enables all such organization types to avoid the excessive costs of bank transformation charges. We understand that the on-going cost and maintenance efforts required to support evolving standards can have a major impact. To address this, we constantly update the list of standards that we support, and provide automatic upgrade utilities to ensure the lowest possible total cost of ownership."