Driving SEPA compliance
Advanced secure-chip testing provider, FIME, is the first laboratory to be authorised by the Open Standards for Cards (OSCar) Consortium to perform Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Host Acquirer Platform (HAP) certifications.
SEPA, a European integration initiative to streamline cross-border payment processes, aims to ensure a customer’s experience is consistent when making and accepting payments throughout the euro area. The OSCar Consortium brings together the European payments community to focus on the implementation of a stable and sustainable infrastructure for payment service providers to adhere to the SEPA Card Standardisation programme in the terminal-to-acquirer domain. This will encourage and promote the development and deployment of SEPA compliant point-of-sale (POS) payment solutions throughout Europe.
The HAP certification confirms that acquiring bank infrastructures adhere to the functional SEPA standards, which aim to ensure that all POS terminals within SEPA are using the same ‘language’ to relay information. This will shortly be complemented by a further authorisation which will allow FIME to certify that the point-of-interaction (POI) component within the terminals also adheres to OSCar requirements.
Loÿs Moulin, Coordinator of the OSCar Consortium, comments: “Compliance to the SEPA best-practice standards is essential to drive the establishment of an integrated European payments infrastructure. Moving from domestic POS solutions to a standardised SEPA environment will bring greater efficiency to European business, offering increased cross-border competition and streamlined processes. The benefits of SEPA are widely understood and reflected in the support and engagement of major payment industry players in the OSCar Consortium.”
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