Dutch banking groupABN AMROis planning to use IT systems
introduced to support the introduction of a Europe-wide payments
market to provide processing services to other banks.
ABN AMRO has invested heavily in technology to support the
Single
European Payment Area (Sepa), and will offer its core payment
processing technology - which has been adapted to deal with
payments under the new system - as a service to banks wishing to
outsource.
Sepa is the European Commission's initiative to create a
payments market across the
Eurozone. Sepa
payments will be made available from January 2008.
"Because of Sepa we are currently seeing more banks looking to
outsource this activity. We have been investing in Sepa since its
inception. Obviously bringing more scale and volume to our
platforms both generates a revenue stream and also helps bring down
our internal unit costs," said Mike Hampson, head of financial
institutions and transaction banking at ABN AMRO.
The
Royal Bank of Scotland is also working towards being able to
process Sepa payments. "We will be offering processing services to
other banks," a spokesperson said.
Barclays said it would manage
Sepa internally. "We always look at the options of insourcing
and outsourcing, and insourcing is the best way in this case," a
spokeswoman said.
HBOS said it is watching the situation closely and is likely to
make an announcement before the year end.
A spokeswoman at Apacs, the UK payments association, which has
been giving the UK perspective on Sepa to the European Commission,
said banks in the UK will be expected to offer Sepa services to
their corporate customers.
"Banks will be well aware of corporate customers' needs and can
either tap into Sepa directly, continue with existing systems and
wait and see what demand for Sepa is like, or they can process
payments via other banks," she said.
There will be an opportunity for banks with the right
infrastructure to attract outsourcing customers, according to last
week's World Payments Report 2007, published by ABN AMRO, Capgemini
and the European Financial Management & Marketing Association.
The report revealed that 58% of banks will outsource Sepa
payments.