Introduction
This site will report on the changes in the European financial landscape moving towards SEPA specifically on the account statements.From format perspective the situation is simple for customer sending SEPA payments. Initiating customers will be motivated to start using the UNIFI formats like pain.001 and pain.008. The initiation formats are very well documented by EPC (implementation guidelines).
The reporting site of the story is complicated and less good defined. However, the UNIFI reporting formats (camt052, 053, 054) are recommendated by EPC now and guidelines are on their way. Another issue is that during the first period of the migration from domestic to SEPA, most customers will continue to use the current reporting formats. These can be domestic defined (e.g. CODA in Belgium) or bank specific (e.g. GMU for ING Postbank customers) or SWIFT oriented (e.g. MT940, MT942).
SWIFT proposes the reuse the current MT940 to be able to receive MT940s containing SEPA statements until the financial industry is moved to UNIFI.