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You are here: Home -> SEPA -> The Vision A A 

The Single Euro Payments Area or SEPA is the payments industry's contribution to a political vision — the Single Internal Market in Europe. SEPA is the next step towards European integration, which aims to make all electronic cross-border payments in euro between the participating countries as easy, inexpensive and secure as 'national' payments within one member state are today. In the new SEPA world a customer can make electronic payments to any beneficiary located anywhere in the euro area using a single bank account and a single set of payment instructions. This means that making a payment from Dublin to Dusseldorf will cost the same as from Dublin to Dingle, and will be processed within the same timeframe.

 

SEPA will enhance competition between national payment environments by opening up markets to providers and ensuring equal opportunities. It will bring with it higher service levels, more efficient products and cheaper alternatives for making payments across national boundaries.

 

The SEPA programme has been championed by the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB), working with the Eurosystem, and with the support of the European Payments Council (EPC) which brings together the European payments industry.

 

The EPC, through various EPC Working Groups and the Programme Management Forum (PMF), issued Implementation guidelines and scheme rules to assist the banks with their SEPA implementation planning. The Chief Executive of IPSO is the Irish representative at the European Payments Council.