EBA Clearing announced that is implementing a STEP2 Card Clearing Service for a go-live in April 2015

The new STEP2 service will be based on the SEPA Card Clearing Framework developed by the Berlin Group, a group of 27 major players in the card industry from 25 countries in and beyound Eurozone; the aim of the Berlin Group is to standardise card clearing across Europe by leveraging SEPA infrastructure.

The service has been developed of a group of major German banks who have agreed to be the launching community of the STEP2 Card Clearing Service. The banks will use the STEP2 Card Clearing Service for clearing payments related to pre-authorised card transactions in line with the specifications of the German GIROCARD scheme.

The new pan-European service on EBA CLEARING’s euro retail payment platform will enable user banks to leverage their XML infrastructure and to re-use the interfaces and bank-internal systems they have put in place for the STEP2 SEPA Direct Debit Services.

„The service is open to all banks and EBA CLEARING invites all banks wishing to take advantage of the new service to express their interest”, according to a press release.

EBA CLEARING is a provider of pan-European payment infrastructure solutions. The company was founded in 1998 and is owned by 62 of the major banks operating in Europe.

STEP2 is a pan-European payment infrastructure for mass payments providing full reach to all financial institutions across Europe processing credit transfers and direct debits in Euro. More than 4,800 financial institutions in 34 countries are reachable via STEP2.

Apart from cross-border transactions, the STEP2 platform processes domestic payments for the banking communities in Estonia, Finland, Luxembourg and Ireland as well as for numerous major banks in other countries, e.g. Germany, Italy and Latvia.