According to a recent Accenture survey, compliance with the Single European Payments Area (SEPA) project is causing payments industry executives to report much higher estimates of investment costs. As a result of this it is feared that business and technology resources will be stretched.
Researchers questioned 47 senior payments experts from major banks, commercial/interbank processors and local industry in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, United Kingdom, Latvia and Ireland. The study was conducted between April and June.
Only 37 percent of respondents said they intend to be fully SEPA compliant by the 2008 interim deadline. Between 2008 and 2010, countries’ existing national payment systems will co-exist with SEPA payments, before full migration to SEPA payments in 2010. Banks which have not upgraded their systems by 2008 will need interim solutions to convert SEPA payments for processing by existing systems until 2010.
One of the reasons that two-thirds of respondents will not be SEPA compliant by 2008 is that the initiative is stretching many banks’ business and technology resources to the limit.
“This data indicates that regulatory compliance threatens to overload the industry by soaking up so many resources,” says Noel Gordon, managing director of Accenture’s Banking practice in Europe, Africa and Latin America. “Several executives indicated in interviews that they were worried that SEPA might actually stifle product innovation – just the opposite of what’s intended.”