The long awaited day for many European companies has therefore come: from today to the cross-border transfers within Union law will apply, by virtue of Regulation 2560/2001, the same fees provided for those taking place within a single country. On two conditions: that the amount is less than € 12,500 (the threshold will rise to 50,000 € from 1 January 2006) and that the customer provides the bank's IBAN (International Bank Account Number) and BIC (Bank Identifier Code).
Almost a revolution then, when you consider that today the cost of transfers can 'be 50 or 100 times that of a domestic bank. This effect of the non-existence, more than four years after the single currency, a single European payments area. The Commission had, since the early 90s, urged banks to start integration of national payment systems, but confronted with a lack of progress in July 2001 had decided to go the hard way and to require banks to the level of charges. "The Commission's policy objective is to create a single payment at the European level, where consumers and businesses no longer have to deal with national borders," said Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein.
hard way that the first effects are starting to feed and that is causing banks to move to create the necessary infrastructure to process cross-border payments: In June 2002, representatives of major European banks and banking associations of the major Europe gave birth to the European Payments Council (EPC) which aims to coordinate European banks in the transition to a unified payment area.
The strong initial opposition from the banks is understandable: now not only have to give up profits to non-negligible cross-border transactions, but rather will be forced to carry a loss, given that their cost for the bank industry is between 10 and 20 times higher than that of internal operations: while the latter are entirely automated, the crossing of a frontier involves several steps instead of "manual". "We will have to recover these losses by increasing charges for domestic transfers" warn by the European Banking Federation. "The cross-border transfers account for only 1 to 2% of the total, therefore, a substantial increase in fees would not be justifiable retort from Brussels.
The automation of cross-border payments is the only solution. To this end, the EPC, on 28 April, launched two STEP (Straight Through Euro Processing 2), the first pan-European clearing house for credit transfers a reduced amount, and with the agreement called Credeuro, set standards for carrying out transfers. However, this is a solution that has its costs. The McKinsey has estimated the cost of creating infrastructure and adaptation by banks more than € 1 billion, a figure considered by many excessive relative to the small number of cross-border transactions (although lower costs will certainly entail a large growth of such operations). For consumers and businesses will be up anyway to pay the bill, but at least it is not only to repay the banks of the operations at a loss, but also to build an infrastructure for the payments it makes more efficient internal market.
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