IPFA

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 Association (IPFA) to work on global standardisation as well.

• The IPFA 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 IPFA provides a framework to make it easier to implement payment processing between country formats where an IPFA member serves as a gateway for that jurisdiction. The IPFA interoperates with local formats – it does not replace them.
• As part of IPFA, Equens and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta are offering as of October 2010 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.