IPSO, the Irish Payments Services Organisation Limited has announced March 31st as the SEPA deadline for compliance. This announcement comes on the back of the extension of the original February 1st deadline. The February deadline had been extended until August by the EU. The EU was effectively forced to extend the deadline as only accepting SEPA transactions would have crippled commerce in the European Union due to lacklustre migration. However, Ireland’s migration rates to SEPA are high with 95% of payments compliant by February 1st per IPSO. This prompted the organisation and its member banks to announce a SEPA deadline of March 31st.
The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) comprises the 28 EU member states, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Monaco. It is an area within which you can make and receive payments in euro, under the same basic conditions, rights and obligations, regardless of their location, whether between or within national boundaries.
SEPA is designed to speed up the processing of transactions across the EU, in particular in transactions that cross borders. The benefits of this are to be seen by consumers and SME’s in particular. However, major disruptions could be caused to your business if you are not SEPA compliant by the March 31st deadline as payments may not be processed by IPSO member banks.
So make sure you and your business has migrated before the SEPA deadline. For everything you need to know you can check out Big Red Cloud’s SEPA resource or if you have any questions about SEPA compliant accounting software please don’t hesitate to contact us at 01-2048300
