Accenture has been selected by CEDICAM, the payment flow and systems subsidiary of the Credit Agricole Group, a financial services institution in Europe, to launch a new payment processing platform.
Under the agreement, Accenture will implement the new IT platform for the Group to process the collection of European payments under the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Direct Debit scheme (SDD), as required by the European Commission and the French regulator.
The new platform centralises SEPA direct debit collections for Credit Agricole’s several French regional IT payment systems, and processes payment transactions for the Group’s banks.
In addition, the platform enables the company to process high volumes of payments rapidly and cost-efficiently through a single IT platform and accelerates the time it takes to launch new value-added payment products and services, particularly for the Group’s corporate customers.
The SEPA directive was designed to standardise Europe’s electronic payments market including: card payments, credit transfers and direct debits.
Accenture financial services group senior executive Bao-Viet Le said given the need to integrate with a variety of existing bank systems, many of the changes to bank products required by SEPA are highly complex and required significant development efforts.
"Specifically, the implementation of the SEPA Direct Debit scheme has been perceived by many banks as being one of the most complex challenges due to its significant differences with existing national schemes," Le said.
"CEDICAM was able to implement a common payment platform to handle SEPA direct debits within the compliance deadline, and this new platform is robust enough to also handle the ever-growing volume of other SEPA transactions, including credit transfers, international payments and high-value payments."
