Member Article

How will the Single Euro Payments Area affect retailers?

SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) looks set to transfer retail in Europe.

Credit Transfer is a quick and easy way to make cross-border payments within any of the 34 countries in the SEPA zone, but SEPA Direct Debits and card payments are also great solutions for businesses already trading across Europe or those considering doing so.

SEPA makes international payments as easy to send and receive as domestic transfers, and SEPA Direct Debits in particular will enable retailers to automatically collect payments from anyone with a bank account in an SEPA country.

Let’s look at some of the ways these differing SEPA options will affect retailers.

• SEPA Direct Debits – SEPA helps with cross-border Direct Debits, so whether you are a brick and mortar retailer or online store, SEPA Direct Debits can benefit you. They will also have a huge impact on companies that sell by contract or subscription, such as mobile phone providers. Before SEPA, retailers had to set up bank accounts in each country to automatically collect Direct Debit payments from a customer’s bank account. SEPA standardises things to makes this possible using just a single bank account across all 34 SEPA countries.
• SEPA Credit Transfer – SEPA helps connect you to your vendors and customers across Europe, assisting with international credit transfer. Whether you pay your vendors by credit transfer or customers pay you by transfer upon receipt of an invoice, SEPA Credit Transfer is a useful scheme.
• SEPA card payments – SEPA is helping to make card payments a more attractive option; generally, payments will go through an EFT service provider and retailers will have integration with their accounting systems. A move towards EMV chip cards should help to make card payments more secure across Europe.

Are you SEPA ready?

It’s vital to make sure your business is ready for SEPA – this means ensuring you are compliant with SEPA’s core provisions. Non-Euro countries have until 31st October 2016 to comply with the core provisions, although the deadline for corporates and banks to comply is this year! If you’re not ready for SEPA, the dangers are that you could:

• Find yourself unable to pay your creditors.
• Experience delays reconciling debtor and creditor ledgers.
• Experience delays receiving customer payments.

AccessPay’s cloud-based SEPA Solution…

AccessPay can provide your business with a fully compliant cloud-based SEPA Payment Solution. We offer subscription based pricing, so there are no set-up fees or upgrade charges, and you won’t find any transaction caps. Simply pay for what you use, whilst benefiting from our enhanced security and encryption. With anywhere, everywhere access, you’re in complete control.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ali Moiyed .