STEP2 is Ready for SEPA Migration End-date
With the deadline for migration to the single euro payments area (SEPA) only 20 months away, EBA Clearing has announced key deliverables of its project geared at readying the STEP2 platform for processing large domestic volumes in an integrated euro payments environment. The company introduced a batch processing functionality in the STEP2 SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) Service on 30 April 2012 as a first measure specifically targeted at attracting high volumes of domestic traffic to its pan-European automated clearing house (PE-ACH) platform. The new processing mode enables banks to send batches with transactions pre-sorted by counterparty, which allows for lighter and cheaper processing.
Furthermore, a performance programme launched in April will upgrade the software of the system, allowing STEP2 to reach a processing level of several hundred million payments per day, depending on the system configuration. “STEP2 has very impressive scalability and is capable of handling very high volumes. If it were required, STEP2 could process most, if not of all of Europe’s transactions as they migrate to SEPA formats over the next 20 months, including the extreme volume peaks that inevitably occur,” said John Broxis, director, STEP2 Services. “In addition, the recently activated batch processing mode cuts the processing cost in half, which has further increased the attractiveness of the platform for senders of large domestic volumes.”