EBA CLEARING has announced it will enrich its SEPA payment systems, RT1 and STEP2, with fraud prevention and detection capabilities by November 2023. The new Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection (FPAD) service will let RT1 and STEP2 users supplement existing fraud-fighting tools and evaluations with information from a centralised network.

FPAD will cover a wide spectrum of tools for real-time fraud prevention and detection. The solution will also incorporate 'confirmation of payee' capabilities, which will allow PSPs to flexibly integrate the ability for customers to discover any inconsistencies in the IBAN/name combination they have supplied for the recipient of payment into their service offerings. This will allow users to meet the proposed Instant Payments Regulation's fraud prevention criteria.

After the introduction of a blueprint and subsequent RT1 and STEP2 user consultation in Q4 2022, EBA CLEARING's FPAD solution development began in early 2023. The pan-European solution is being developed with the help of STEP2 and RT1 participants; it will be supplied in stages, beginning with transaction and account risk assessment modules. These initial modules, which include the ability for PSPs to request an IBAN/name matching check, will be ready in November 2023.

EBA CLEARING’s developments regarding RT1 and STEP2 EBA CLEARING announced the conversion of the RT1 technical account from TARGET2 to TIPS in December 2021 . The RT1 community went operational on December 10, 2021, as part of the first migration wave for auxiliary systems organised by the Eurosystem. RT1 provides payment service providers in the Single Euro Payments Area with a cutting-edge, real-time payment processing infrastructure that operates around the clock, every day of the year, for payments in accordance with the European Payments Council's SCT Inst Scheme (EPC).

On weekdays, over 1. 6 million payments are completed in RT1 – in real-time and with quick finality, in roughly one second, across Europe. EBA CLEARING enhanced its payment system in January 2022 to handle SEPA transactions around the clock and send settlement findings to participating banks in minutes.

STEP2 members may now reduce end-to-end processing times for retail payments in Europe to minutes. STEP2 conducts 55 million SEPA credit transfers and direct debits each day on average. The system connects over 4,800 payment service providers across Europe and allows end users to make payments throughout the continent.

Enriching SEPA Payments SEPA-enforced payment unification has improved the efficiency and competitiveness of the European economy as a whole by removing discrepancies between national and cross-border payments and harmonising standards across all member nations. A SEPA API Access Scheme working group was formed in 2018 by the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB), a stakeholder body led by the European Central Bank. This group released a Report from the ERPB WG on a SEPA API Access Scheme on June 13th, 2019.

The SEPA API Access Scheme arose from a desire to go beyond the benefits of the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and create incentives for Account Servicing Payment Service Providers (ASPSPs), which are traditional banks and other financial institutions, to align their service development with third-party provider market needs. The scheme primarily advances PDS2 activities, notably in the context of payment initiation services (PIS) and account information services (AIS) and contributes to the development of a fully integrated European payments market. As a result, the program would incentivise Account Servicing Payment Service Providers (ASPSPs), which include conventional banks and other financial institutions, to match their service development with the market demands of third-party providers.

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