This opens up the possibility of consolidated payments, of liquidity management in one location and of optimising the cash flow. The European Commission has stepped in with the Payment Services Directive which, among other changes, ensures that the full amount of a transaction is transmitted and that payments are executed more quickly, thus saving time and money. As the transition to SEPA had to speed up, the European Council adopted in February 2012 a new regulation establishing 1 February 2014 as the deadline for the migration to SEPA of credit transfers and direct debits made in euro. This means that users, including corporates, need to migrate too! SEPA is also about innovation; the project is active in innovative fields such as einvoicing and e-reconciliation within Europe, which can offer huge savings for corporates in the handling of payments. The ECB, in its role as a co-chair of the SEPA Council together with the European Commission, stands ready to pursue a dialogue with all stakeholders on these important matters. Conclusion Let me to bring my remarks today to a conclusion. In the last quarter of 2011 the euro area economy was facing increasing cross-countries heterogeneities and, overall, a clear risk of a credit crunch. The increasing pressures on banks’ funding and capital positions could have led to a scaling-back of banks’ lending activity to the private sector.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  To apply – or even try to apply – a federal or pan-European approach to such a diversified financial system requires, in my eyes, a key precondition: to have a functioning European federation in the first place. If that is not possible then we should not try to create half-baked pan-European solutions here in the area of banking – an area which is arguably more sensitive in many aspects than that of fiscal policy and fiscal transfers. If we are not careful enough, we risk repeating the difficulties of the single currency project. The euro is a currency without a state. This means nobody knows who should pay what to whom in bad times. It is for good times only. And we now all know very well that this is the biggest shortcoming of the whole project. Some believe that cross-border integration is good per se, without any conditions. I tend to believe – not least because of the current crisis – that cross-border integration of national financial systems is welcome only if EACH of the national systems alone is and can be sufficiently sound and stable. That’s why we at the Czech National Bank are so nervous about this tendency to continue separating the powers of supervisory and regulatory authorities from their responsibilities in the area of financial regulation. These powers are gradually shifting in small steps towards those who have no direct responsibility and no pots of money to pay should things go wrong in the future.