Indeed, the vision for the Single Euro Payments Area – SEPA – is for all European payments to be treated in the same way as domestic payments, with no difference between national and cross-border payments in euro. This will be achieved by using a single set of payment instruments which are as simple, safe and efficient as those used in the national context today.
Today, we can trade goods and services without borders in Europe; we also use euro as our single currency; we must also have borderless and fully harmonized payments to complete the Single Market. On January 2008 we introduced the SEPA credit transfers and the European cards framework.