The Statement of the June 2021 Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) meeting endorsed a set of recommendations formulated by the ERPB working group on transparency for retail payment end-users. The following recommendations have been assigned to payment schemes such as the European Payments Council (EPC) Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payment schemes:
- Rec 01: Consistently use commercial trade name and provide this name to all involved parties in the payment chain for use in client’s payment account statements.
- Rec 05: Use standards and applications suitable for including identified data sets “end-to-end”. Upgrade or change these standards when necessary.
- Rec 10: Proactively ensure that their scheme rules encourage all the relevant recommendations to the largest extent possible.
The ERPB determined that the various transparency-related recommendations assigned to the different stakeholder groups, must be implemented by June 2024.
On 25 May 2022, the EPC published the guidance document EPC088-22 addressed to both payees and SEPA payment scheme participants pointing out that existing elements in the relevant ISO 20022 standard-based XML messages used under the SEPA payment schemes can already be used to transport the “whom”, “where” and/or “when” information.
The EPC guidance document lists the existing rulebook datasets and attributes that are suitable to transport and display information related to the “whom”, “where” and “when” in SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT), SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) and SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) Core transactions.
All SCT, SCT Inst and SDD Core scheme participants should strongly encourage their payees concerned (e.g., (online) merchants, large SDD Creditors, etc) how to better use existing SCT, SCT Inst and SDD Core scheme datasets and attributes to provide more clarity to the payer about the “whom”, “where” and “when” of a SEPA transaction.