February 1st 2014 is the limit date in the majority of the Euro zone countries for the use of the national standards for payments transfer.
In France, the low level of communication or the choosen channels about SEPA and this End date, the lack of coordination of the main actors, the economic context, the low benefits and the necessary costs are certainly the origin of the actual situation: only the major companies got an interest to and began a SEPA project.
The software vendors mainly took care of these potential big "clients" but through a technical approach and with the aim to capture flows.
ALAXY does not follow the same goals, we are not here to sell services but to help the enterprises to be ready in time for a low investment. Furthermore, we are coming from this payment world and know all the main traps of the SEPA implementation. We payed attention to the SME needs when creating SEPA_NDAT to facilitate their SEPA migration, reduce delays and costs.
SEPA instruments are not perfect, they result in compromises, regulation, work from different teams and its implementation depends on banks' own choices.
The way is still long to have at disposal real, efficient and shared European instruments but this End Date is there and we have to do the work. We believe our approach is the right one, no need to rebuild existing applications, it is not yet the time and it is necessary to wait some more years for the products and standards stabilization (e.g. the BIC was at the begin mandatory, after the February 1st 2014, it will be optional in some cases, completly optional after the February 1st 2016 but some presence cases are still not handled!). Gateway type applications as SEPA_NDAT have the capacity to satisfy enterprises' needs for long years with the advantage to limit impacts of annual releases in one only point.
In the following points, we discuss about general themes: