EBA CLEARING’s STEP2 platform responds to corporate requirement for nearly unlimited structured remittance information in SEPA Credit Transfers

• Enhanced extended remittance information service successfully activated in the pan-European retail payment system

EBA CLEARING announced today the activation of an enhanced extended remittance information service on its pan-European automated clearing house platform STEP2. The new service, which took up operations yesterday, supports the inclusion of up to 999 structured invoice and credit note references in a single SEPA Credit Transfer.

The service responds to corporate requests for a further increase of the amount of structured remittance data that can be included in a SEPA transaction. It supports the bundling of a large number of invoices and credit notes in one payment and easy reconciliation at the level of the corporate receiving the transaction.

This additional optional service (AOS), registered as AOS2 by the Finnish community with the European Payments Council, is available to any STEP2 user that wishes to offer the service to its customers. The service was already activated by eight STEP2 participant banks on the launch date and will be rolled out by five more financial institutions to their customers in the near future.

“The extension of the AOS2 is particularly welcomed by the large corporates in Finland, as it helps them to fully automate their payment processing,” said Inkeri Tolvanen, Head of Payment Systems at the Federation of Finnish Financial Services.

“The fact that our customers can now put much more structured remittance data into one SEPA transaction will help to increase automation rates on both ends of the process and further bring down our reconciliation cost,” said Laura Hänninen, Treasury Manager at Sanoma Corporation. “As a front running consumer media and learning company in Europe, with customers and suppliers in several SEPA countries, we welcome this new service and the optimisation potential it offers at a European scale.”

“Already previously we have been able to offer this service to our customers provided that both debtor and creditor were holding accounts with Danske Bank. Now the service has been expanded to cover also our customers’ counterparties holding accounts with other banks,” said Olli Savolainen, Head of Cash Management Corporates & Institutions Finland at Danske Bank. “This means that a growing number of corporates in Finland and SEPA can benefit from nearly unlimited remittance data capacity for their ISO 20022compliant payments.”

“The implementation of the enhanced extended remittance AOS in STEP2 is another example of our efforts to serve the needs of our user communities and of their customers in a flexible and efficient manner,” said David Renault, Head of STEP2, EBA CLEARING.

The STEP2 SEPA Services extend full reach to financial institutions offering SEPA Credit Transfers and SEPA Direct Debits to their customers across the Single Euro Payments Area: over 4,800 financial institutions in 34 countries are currently reachable via STEP2. The STEP2 SEPA system has been identified as one of the Systemically Important Payment Systems (SIPS) in Europe by the European Central Bank.