The payment processor and clearing house Equens successfully exchanged the first SEPA transactions based on EACHA’s Interoperability Framework with Iberpay, Spain and Seceti, Italy.
The parties are the first from a group of CSMs that announced in October 2007 establishing interoperability between each other. More bilateralinteroperability agreements are expected to go live within the coming weeks.
Bilateral exchange of payments between CSMs will enable the simple andefficient exchange of SEPA payments between CSM communities and otherpaticipants in the payment chain.
Whenever a bank connected to Equens dispatches payments to another bankconnected to Seceti or Iberpay, the payments can be routed completely within the systems of the companies without using an external centralisedinfractructure. This also means that the sending bank doesn’t need toparticipate in the infrastructure to which the receiving bank is connectedto.
“Linking the communities of our CSMs will benefit our clients in numerous ways. We offer them cost efficiency by operating on existing infrastructures as well as speed through same day settlement thanks to synchronized cut-off times and freedom of choice,” says Michael Steinbach, chairman of Equens’ board of directors.
Furthermore, the CSM service through bilateral links complies to industry standards such as European Payment Council (EPC) Scheme Rulebooks and Implementation Guidelines, the UNIFI message sets and the PEACH/CSM framework. It’s also secure by using TARGET2 for settlement and using settlement accounts held by central banks or, in the future, settlementaccounts based on the fiduciary account principle as described by the EACHAframework.