After February 1st 2014, file formats currently used for payment orders (credit transfers or direct debits) will no longer be accepted by banks in most Euro countries. National formats (AFB or CFONB for France) will be abandonned in favor of European formats based on the XML ISO20022 standards.

Two countries have asked to postpone the End Date to 2016 but in all others (including France), every enterprise will be under the obligation to implement these new formats and migrate their applications or flows online in a way that meets SEPA requirements.

The stakes are high: if enterprises are not ready by February 1st, salaries and suppliers will not be paid and debts will not be recovered.

The SEPA project in the enterprise will need to take into consideration the technical aspects ("pain.001" support for credit transfers, "pain.008" for direct debits, BIC/IBAN), the functional aspects (relation, mandate support, delays, sequence) and the organizational and financial impacts without missing the handling of the banks returns.

The main difficulties that the enterprise will face are the following:

• Current file quality generated by the enterprise: the feeding often very old, data quality (data presence, data uniqueness) and format mapping does not facilitate the XML file generation due to differences in data presentation and data models, SEPA data model being richer
• Banks' implementation rules: the enterprise will have to face the banks' implementation choices and the same payment service will require different feeding depending on the bank (e.g. some optional data in SEPA are mandatory for some banks).
• New SEPA and ISO payment products: current payment products have another - but equivalent - product name in the SEPA world. New ones have also been added. Based on the same ISO format (ISO20022), we now find SEPA and ISO products, requiring different data feeding.
• Banks' reporting: new XML formats are appearing in the reporting areas. Some are only provided at the customer's request (e.g. camt.054 will replace the CFONB240 format for France and camt.053 will replace CFONB120). All these formats differ in their data model and characteristics (list of data, length of data, etc.) and so the choice of reports is not easy when the enterprise is not full XML. For the PSR (Payment status report, equivalent to the French ARA), the entreprise will have to deal with different XML formats depending on the ISO version.

When the enterprise sends direct debits, additional aspects must also be handled:

• new credit dates with delays depending on the type of mandate and sequence order
• new types of mandate (one-off, recurrent, CORE, B2B) 
• new life cycles with specific mandate sequence
• new notification requirements to debitors
• new data associated with mandates
• new types of rejections
• new requests from banks (mandate checks)
• new relations with debtors.

The new BIC and IBAN support must not be forgotten although the BIC should progressly disappear over the next two years.