SEPA Direct Debits: Opportunity or Opprobrium

by Helen Sanders, Editor

The SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) went live on 2 November 2009, representing the next major step towards payments harmonisation across the Eurozone. But was its arrival feted by floods of keen corporations desperate to leverage the new instrument? Did we see customers queuing up outside their banks waving their new mandates? Well no. The SDD has created more of a flicker than an inferno, and in the five months since its launch, there has still been about as much momentum than is required to power an average electric lightbulb. As Karsten Becker, Product Manager, Deutsche Bank summarises,

“SEPA Direct Debits are now live, so customers are now in a position to use both core and B2B SEPA direct debits. However, the statistics show that the vast majority of companies have not yet chosen to migrate to these schemes.”

So what is the SDD, why haven’t organisations flocked to use it, and has their reticence been misguided?

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