Looking for DD collection in Europe?  Harlands Group are to embrace SEPA

The concept of the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) has been mooted for many years. Following the introduction of the SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) in January 2008, SEPA finally became a reality. After a slow start, volumes of the product have begun to rise: by May 2010, around 6.5% of credit transfers in Europe were SEPA-compliant, compared to 2.9% a year earlier. One of the primary hurdles to greater uptake of SEPA so far has been the staggered nature of implementation.

Until the launch of the SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) in November 2009 the collections element of SEPA was missing - as was the legal underpinning of the entire SEPA project, the Payment Services Directive (PSD) - leaving a major gap in corporates' ability to manage working capital effectively using SEPA-compliant instruments. Of course, the introduction of SEPA has hardly been assisted by the financial crisis globally and in the euro zone over the past two years.  Numerous previous regulatory and industry initiatives - while not on the same scale as SEPA - have enjoyed faster uptake and broader market acceptance because of banks' and corporates' willingness to invest. The option of simply throwing money at the problem hasn't existed on this occasion. "After a series of false dawns, the tools are now there for corporates to integrate SEPA products into their accounts payable and receivables processes," says Anne Boden, head of GTS EMEA at RBS in London. "SEPA has finally become a tangible reality, and there is now greater consideration of the potential benefits by corporates. Nevertheless, there remain serious concerns that banks need to work hard to address."

 Harlands Group has experienced significant growth over the past 5 years and has for some time viewed the euro zone as the next major expansion opportunity but until SEPA the logistics of setting up legacy systems in each country or selective countries has not been attractive.  SEPA means we can now collect direct debits throughout Europe and offer our services to a much wider audience whilst still using the UK as a base.  There are also real business advantages to SEPA for clients with clearing time being reduced from 3 days to 1 day.

Further growth is also likely to mean that the unit cost of processing will continue to fall and all our clients can look forward to reduced processing costs in the future.  Of course much of Harlands business is about more than just the collection.  Europe has seen significant growth of the low cost or budget health and fitness brands over the past 3 years and SEPA will being increased opportunities to many as online internet sign up of dd is already built into the SEPA dd framework.  Our core UK based clientele will remain on the legacy Bacs system but it is likely that SEPA will replace all legacy system across Europe in the not too distant future.

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