The European Payments Council has published an updated version of the SEPA Payment Account Access scheme rulebook. The updated 1.1 version of the scheme rulebook will replace version 1.0 immediately, but its changes will come into effect on 30 November 2023.

Some of the most important changes introduced in version 1.1 include updates in relation to a mechanism to request a payment with transaction fees not borne by the payer, as well as dataset and attribute alignments, and clarifications on the envisaged homologation process and on the default business conditions. The updates also comprise extended sections regarding strong customer authentication which consider the outcome of a related public consultation that ended on 15 March 2023. The revised rulebook also touches on the definition of a minimum viable product (MVP), which is based on the analysis of market demand.

It covers a set of Premium Application Programming Interface-based services that an asset holder agrees to offer as a minimum to an asset broker. There is now a distinction made between MVP#1 and MVP#2, which is linked to the introduction of different adherence categories for asset holders. More information about the SEPA Payment Account Access (SPAA) Scheme Rulebook The SEPA Payment Account Access (SPAA) Scheme Rulebook was created in line with the requirements defined in a June 2021 report of the ERPB Working Group on a SEPA Application Programming Interface (API) Access Scheme.

The rulebook covers the set of rules, practices, and standards that will allow the exchange of payment accounts related data and facilitates the initiation of payment transactions, in the context of ‘value-added’ API-based services provided by asset holders to asset brokers such as Payment Initiation Service Providers or Account Information Service Providers. The first version (1.0) of the scheme rulebook takes into account the comments received during a three-month rulebook public consultation that concluded on 12 September 2022. In December 2022, Tino Meissner from Deutsche Bank was interviewed by The Paypers and talked about SPAA and the challenges that it aims to solve.

He emphasised that SPAA goes beyond the regulatory requirements of PSD2 to facilitate the distribution of value and risk as equally as possible along the payment processing chain. SPAA proposes detailed standards for account access procedures, which, at a minimum, need to be compliant with existing and future regulatory requirements. He revealed that, when creating the rulebook, the working group focused on how account-based data and transactional assets can be better leveraged to meet the needs of current and future use cases.

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