RBS received an Award from the global magazine The Banker for its implementation of CGI SEPA Accelerator to generate €2.5m in 2014 through, a 500% return on investment, reports XMLdation, a testing all payment-related XML services consultancy quoting The Banker Journal.

By February 2014, the eurozone’s payments market should have harmonious standards in cross-border payments, as stipulated in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) project. SEPA has loomed over banks for more than a decade, but no concrete progress was made until the European Commission set a final deadline in early 2012. For many banks, the biggest issue regarding SEPA is in migrating their corporate customers to the new standards, something that is not easy when payments systems vary throughout Europe and many corporates did not anticipate the technical and cultural changes.

In December, RBS authorised a four-man team to find IT software application vendors who could help the bank create a SEPA solution that could be implemented within six months, could increase the speed of client onboarding – from four to six months to four to six weeks, enough time to migrate the about 3600 clients on time – and require minimal changes to clients’ systems.

IT and business process outsourcing provider CGI, which had acquired IT and consultancy company Logica in 2012, and XMLdation, a company that specialises in validating and SEPA testing, received the contract. The result was the RBS SEPA Accelerator, an end-to-end, all-in-one migration service with several applications, hosted on the cloud. It includes a self-service conversion solution for legacy direct debit and corporation tax formats into SEPA-compliant ones. The service’s average rate of successful message delivery is 1 million transactions per hour, with 24-hour availability and a self-service function for testing and validating SEPA formats.

The solution converts legacy messaging formats into SEPA ones, and domestic bank account numbers to international ones, as stipulated in SEPA. Other solutions include SEPA mandate management, a new culture for some corporates as mandate management is not common in some countries.

The project was delivered within four months – initial pilots with six clients took place in April; the first tranche of products went live in May, and by June, the bank had 20 clients live on the system. RBS is set to generate €2.5m in 2014 through SEPA Accelerator, a 500% return on investment.