Only four months SWIFT launched the routing directory for the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), its adoption by the financial industry is beyond expectations.
Today, the directory contains routing information for 98% of SEPA participants.
The SEPA Routing Directory is an operational database used by financial institutions automated clearing houses (ACHs) and corporates active in SEPA to exchange SEPA payments efficiently. The directory shows all financial institutions that have signed the SEPA Credit Transfer adherence agreement with the European Payments Council (EPC), their routing Bank Identifier Codes (BICs) capable of processing the SEPA credit transfers, and their reachability through SEPA-capable ACHs, including all participants of the EBA STEP2 SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) service. Financial institutions use this directory to decide to which BIC and through which channel to send their SEPA payments.
“SEPA will continue to evolve over the coming years, so it was important to Citi that we use a tool that has the potential to develop as the market itself evolves. By using the new SWIFT SEPA Routing Directory, we were able to build on our existing BIC-IBAN directory infrastructure. Additionally, the new directory is future-proofed as it can handle multiple clearing and settlement mechanisms (CSMs), including preferred routing details and other product types like the SEPA Direct Debit,” says Saurabh Nimaiyar, vice president and head of Major Initiatives – Global Transaction Service Technology EMEA, Citigroup Centre.
“This removes the need for updating our systems as we move forward with SEPA. SWIFT has done a great job in maintaining the high quality of the data,” says Nimaiyar.
The directory now contains more than 22,000 SEPA-capable BICs for more than 4,000 financial institutions active in SEPA. The data has been populated by financial institutions and is being reconciled with various secondary sources such as the European Payments Council (EPC) Register of Participants, the BIC Directory and various ACH reachability tables.
“The quality and completeness of data were always critical success factors for this new, central directory. With 98% of the EPC-adherent institutions and of EBA STEP2 participants now included in the SEPA Routing Directory, the SEPA community has a reliable and unique source of SEPA-ready routing BICs and their payment channels. We see this translated in a steep uptake of the directory by the customer base,” says Nimayar.