Single European Payments Area (Sepa) "fatigue" is starting to
emerge across the financial services community, says a report from
analyst IDC.
This is leading to the increasing risk of "procrastination" when
it comes to financial firms'
Sepa compliance efforts, said the analyst.
In the
report, sponsored by Informatica and Atos Origin, banks are
warned that "unless they are innovative and seek to provide
value-added services to customers that use the Sepa infrastructure,
they will fail to generate a return on their investment".
The first stage of Sepa went live this January, but European
banks must still comply with the
Payment Services Directive and Sepa Direct Debits (SDDs).
One of the biggest challenges faced is dealing with a complex
system of "disparate parts" across multiple formats, which is not
scalable as the industry becomes increasingly globalised, said
IDC.
Banks, therefore, need to strike a balance between spending less
on processes but at the same time enhancing them. A key enabler to
achieving this objective is the effective management of the data
that sits across these platforms, says the report.
Rachel Hunt, an analyst at IDC, said, "With all the regulation
that banks have had to comply with over the past ten years it is
not surprising that we are seeing the emergence of Sepa fatigue,
especially among the middle tier banks which have fewer resources
available to adapt their systems to the required changes".
She said, "It is imperative that the harmonisation of payment
systems across Europe is seen as a long-term investment that can be
used as a platform to generate future revenue.
"For example, centralising payment flows will result in more
transparency into customer transactions, which in turn will enable
new opportunities to be identified. In order to make this a reality
banks must effectively address data challenges. If they cannot,
then their Sepa compliance efforts will be akin to building a
two-legged stool".
The
European Commission is currently working on standards for
mobile banking as well as the common European Electronic Invoicing
(EEI) framework, offering banks a long-term strategy for generating
return on investment.
It will be those banks that establish best practices for data
integration and data quality across multiple sources that will be
best placed to take commercial advantage of these developments,
says the report.