Date: 12th December 2012
Topic: Countdown to SEPA – How ready are corporates for the February 2014 compliance deadline?
Respondents: 273 corporate treasury & finance professionals

BACKGROUND & CONTEXT
- The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is an EU initiative to improve the efficiency of cross-border euro payments across 27 countries.
- The EU has mandated that by February 2014, SEPA Credit Transfers (SCT) and SEPA Direct Debits (SDD) will effectively replace national credit transfer and direct debit schemes.
- The February 2014 deadline means that corporates affected need to update their systems and databases to accommodate the new SCT and SDD formats by this date. The objective of this survey was to measure where corporate SEPA currently stands relative to this deadline.

KEY FINDINGS
- More than half (52%) of corporates in the SEPA zone have not yet started their SEPA project, and almost a quarter of these have not even started to investigate the issue. Of those who have already started their SEPA project, 8% are already behind schedule, illustrating the size of the challenge ahead. (Question 3)
- 59% of corporates are only targeting ‘basic compliance’ (no rejected payment instructions) and a further 13% have set no goals for their company’s euro payments by February 2014. Only 28% are currently using SEPA as a platform for creating efficiencies. (Question 2)
- There is still a lot of uncertainty among corporates about what is required for their payments to be SEPA compliant by February 2014. 31% of treasury and finance professionals inside the SEPA zone state that they do not know exactly what will be required for their companies to be compliant by the deadline. (Question 1)

THE SAMPLE
A total of 273 finance and treasury professionals responded to the survey, which was sent out on 27th November 2012. Respondents by organisation type: 89% of the respondents were from corporate treasury / finance departments. For the purpose of the analysis of the data, the answers have been broken down for corporates based inside and outside the SEPA zone.

Full survey:
www.conferences.eurofinance.com/sepa/sites/all/files/5-click_survey_sepa.pdf