On 14 November 2023, the European Payments Council (EPC) published version 1.2 of the 2023 SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) rulebook, which replaces version 1.1 of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook with immediate effect. Version 1.2 has no specific impact on business and operational rules as stated in version 1.1 of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook.
The first main change is that the new entry-into-force date and time of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook is now 17 March 2024 at 03:30 CET (instead of initially 19 November 2023 at 03:30 CET) due to the EPC decision on 24 October 2023 to postpone the migration to the 2019 version of the ISO 20022 standard for all four SEPA payment schemes, to 17 March 2024.
This new entry-into-force time will be preceded by a SEPA-wide 30 minutes downtime period from 03:00 CET up to 03:30 CET. During that downtime period, no single SCT Inst instruction, transaction, r-transaction, transaction investigation and any response message related to them will be possible.
Up to 03:00 CET, all SCT Inst payment messages will be in the 2009 version of the ISO 20022 standard. As of 03:30 CET, all SCT Inst payment messages will be in the 2019 version of that same standard.
The second material change to version 1.2 of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook is the replacement of the SEPA Payment Scheme Management Rules version 4.5 with the EPC Payment Scheme Management Rules version 5.0.
The reason is that as of 28 November 2023, version 5.0 of these Rules will apply to all four SEPA payment schemes (including the SCT Inst scheme) and to the One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) scheme which is formally launched on that same date.
The 2023 SCT Inst rulebook version 1.2 remains in effect up to 16 November 2025 08:00 CET. Annex IV of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook version 1.2 lists all changes compared to the version 1.1 of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook.