SEPA Migration and Renown: MEDEF Barometer
- A SEPA survey conducted end 2010 by the French CEOs organisation MEDEF details corporate plans and readiness to the pan-European payment instruments. This barometer shows that SEPA is now well known for 48% of those interrogated. The amount of renown seemingly depends on the size of the company: for companies with more than one thousand employees, all of those interrogated said they knew about the SEPA. In SMEs nine and less employees, only 25% were aware of the migration constraint.
- Two-thirds of the large companies use SCTs, which represent more than 50% of their credit transfer volumes, but, for two-thirds of the SMEs (from 10 to 49 employees), SCTs only stand for 10% of all credit transfers. It is not time yet to draw conclusions on the SDD (launched last November in France), only used by 2% of those interrogated.
- Several small businesses claim that the migration process is too expensive to explain their delay. The MEDEF recommends that efforts should be made to raise their awareness and to provide SMEs with additional training. For larger companies, it suggests that dedicated information be provided when the national instruments will be deactivated.
- Companies remain pragmatic towards this no-deadline project. In addition, the general opinion is that the European Regulation under way will set the deadline in 2013 for SCTs and 2014 for SDDs. This implies they still have time before addressing these issues. Only the largest organisations, the payments of which intertwine several processes and sometimes complex schemes, are encouraged to anticipate the migration.
- When challenging the draft Regulation, French banks may render the message more confuse to their customer companies and cause even more delay.
See: “Three State Transfers Out of Four to Migrate by End March”
and “The FBF Against SEPA Regulation Project”
and “The FBF Against SEPA Regulation Project”