SEPA, about which you will undoubtedly be hearing a lot more over the next couple of years, is an acronym for the term “Single Euro Payments Area”, designed to do for electronic payment instruments – such as credit transfers, direct debits and card payments – what the introduction of euro notes and coins in 2002 has already done for cash transactions.
So, SEPA is the next logical step on the road to completing the internal market following the introduction of the euro. Since January 1999, priority or large value payments in euro have been facilitated in a standardised way by the TARGET real-time, gross settlement system operated by Eurosystem national central banks.