Cards: New SEPA Cards Standardisation Volume
- The SEPA Cards Standardisation Volume version 6.0 released by the EPC provides technical update and adds further card standards for Europe (Book of Requirements).
- Adjustments were required to adapt to current state of the art, with regards to labelling principles, functional and security requirements of SEPA cards. The certification is more detailed, with a first draft of requirements, reflecting the ongoing discussions between the EPC and private certification initiatives. This enriched version has been validated by the Cards Stakeholders Group (CSG), gathering non financial players from the card ecosystem: manufacturers, vendors, customers (mostly merchants).
- The EPC has already announced that further elements would later on be added, mainly certification and security requirements, including CNP and innovative payments (NFC, for example).
- The intricate process of standardising the SEPA card chain is somewhat slowed down as the EPC has together to seek players’ opinion at different stages and to take into account all previously launched so-called “private” initiatives. These initiatives have been focusing much earlier on each link of the card value chain and each one may now apply to be labelled. This ensures their compliance with and possible integration in the Volume for recognition at the European level. Some initiatives are very mature, as the acquiring/acceptance sector and the certification processes –see the OSCar experiments (“SEPA FAST” for POS terminals and EPAS acquiring protocols) and the OSeC certification (based on “CAS”), which both started this year.
- In addition to this next generation of technical and security standards, the Volume emphasises the topic of certification too: principles for compliance assessment and type approval, starting with face-to-face payments.
- Finally, under pressure from the EU regulator, the Volume must additionally be extended to deal with emerging, alternative payments, all the more since the Commission has just launched an overall consultation on this topic (see “Card: EU Commission Investigating the Payments Industry”) and has been investigating the EPC’s e-payment project since the second semester 2011. These processes might further slow down the European card’s technical unification.
See June and December 2011 Insights