EPC November Release 2023

The European Payment Council is responsible for the further development of the payment processing infrastructure in the SEPA area. This includes not only the introduction of new payment methods such as SEPA Request to Pay, but also the maintenance of existing procedures. New procedure specifications will come into force in November 2023.

What changes with the EPC November Release 2023?

Focus of the changes is the migration of all message formats to the 2019 version of the ISO 20022 standard. The schemes affected are SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT), SEPA Direct Debits for consumers (SDD Core) and direct debits between companies (SDD B2B). Quite the same applies to SEPA Instant Payments (SCT Inst) with the clearing systems TIPS and RT1. This introduction of new schema versions for SEPA is taking place for the first time, so this can be considered the biggest change since SEPA came into existence in February 2014.
The new format versions are characterized in particular by structured address fields, i.e. more detailed information will be possible or necessary here in the future. The aim is to make monetary transactions easier and faster to trace and thus support CESOP, for example. After a transitional period of two years, the use of structured addresses will become mandatory, thus following the corresponding SWIFT requirement. Until then, structured and unstructured address data can be sent. If the bank’s own core banking system does not store address data in a structured form, a conversion must be made in order to be able to process incoming payments. Of course, banks must also encourage their customers to use structured address data when submitting payments by November 2025 at the latest.

The SEPA-clearer of the Deutsche Bundesbank

In the case of the SEPA-Clearer (part of the Bundesbank’s Retail Payments System), the EPC November Release 2023 will of course also be implemented. The participating institutions must carry out mandatory tests and register for them in good time with the BBk support. Due to the high effort required for the format version changeover, changes to SEPA-Clearer itself were not made. The specifically German formats for check deposit (SVV) and card clearing (SCC) will also not undergo any changes in 2023. Further aspects were listed in an article from May 2023.

EPC November Release 2023 with CPG.classic

The users of our payment software CPG.classic will of course be largely spared the effects of the format version change. One exception is the change in address details, as there is still no conversion system for address details with a 100% hit rate. The multitude of different address formats worldwide obviously makes this an unsolvable task.
If you have any questions about the EPC November Release 2023 or our software solutions please use our contact form.