The European Parliament, the Commission and the Council have confirmed the extension of the deadline for the migration to the single euro payments area (SEPA) until August 1.

The latest SEPA migration statistics showed that not all market partici-pants will be SEPA-compliant by February 1, 2014, which was the original deadline.

With the adoption of SEPA there will be no distinction between cross-border and national credit transfers (SCT) and direct debits (SDD) in euro.

The original date for the SEPA migration by February 1, 2014 was regarded as sufficient to allow banks and payment service users to adapt to the technical requirements of SEPA. If the migration had been completed on time, from February 1, 2014, banks and other payment services would have had to refuse to process credit transfers and credit debits that are not SEPA-compliant.

However, since the latest ECB data shows that in December 2013, 73.78 per cent of all credit transfers and only 41 per cent of direct debits in the eurozone complied with the new SEPA standards, sticking to the original deadline would result in a serious disruption of payments.

To avoid such disruption, and a bottleneck that might have been caused by late, large-scale migration, the deadline was extended to August 1, 2014, by which time all participants will have migrated.

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