IPF

SEPA will lead to considerable benefits in terms of standardisation, larger volumes and lower costs. Until now, processing non-euro payments lack these advantages. Over twenty banks, CSMs, associations and software vendors based in Europe, the US, Canada, Brazil and South Africa have founded the International Payments Framework (IPF) to work on global standardisation as well.

• The IPF has created an IPF ISO 20022 format which will serve as exchange format that local country formats will be mapped into/out of. In other words, the IPF provides a framework to make it easier to implement payment processing between country formats where an IPF member serves as a gateway for that jurisdiction. The IPF interoperates with local formats – it does not replace them.
• As part of IPF Equens and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta will offer banks a cost-efficient channel for processing cross-border payments, so-called Global Payment Services between Europe and the USA in euro, US dollar, British pounds and Swiss francs, starting in early 2010.