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The changes in the operation of the Single Euro Payment Area, or SEPA, touched upon both commercial banks, as well as other financial institutions of Lithuania, such as credit unions, payment institutions etc.

 

The provisions of SEPA regulations and general payment schemes were put into practice gradually. In Lithuania the SEPA requirements have become effective from the 1st of January 2016.

 

The principle changes concerned mainly credit orders and direct debit operations. The latter are managed in EUR in accordance with SEPA regulations when the payment service providers of the payer and the beneficiary are situated in EU.

 

Implementation of SEPA payments gives the bank an opportunity to fully integrate into the European settlement system. Such payments enable the clients of financial institutions to much easier perform settlements in EUR. Since SEPA payments are based on the ISO 20022 standard, their implementation provides a possibility to use the payments of ISO standards.

 

In addition to SEPA implementation, there has also been performed introduction of SEPA-MMS. SEPA-MMS is a system of retail payments in EUR managed by the Bank of Lithuania under the SEPA requirements. The system in the on-line mode processes payment orders of the financial payments’ providers registered in the system by either accepting or rejecting such incoming payment orders. The orders may be processed either at a pre-set time or in the on-line mode. The SEPA-MMS system has a possibility to transfer and to get the orders of the providers registered in SEPA with forwarding the processed payment orders into another system meeting the SEPA requirements, i.e. EBA Clearing STEP2, and with accepting the payment orders from STEP2 and processing the operations related to them.

 

SEPA regulations’ requirements give the bank clients a possibility to independently set various parameters of money transfers related to direct debit and to assure a high level of protection of the clients’ accounts.