Implementing SEPA standards SDD en SCT
The section Educational Support and Innovation at the Centre for Information Technology at the University of Groningen develops and maintains the administration suite Progress. Progress tracks many details about every student at the university, these include address, tuition fees and progress in study.
At this moment all banks in the EU and EFTA are in the transition phase to SEPA, the Single European Payments Area. It comprises a new, pan-european banking infrastructure. On February 1st 2014 the last phase of the transition to SEPA starts: The banks will deactivate their old national infrastructure, all banking customers must use their IBAN number instead of their old account number. Because of the new standard, Clieop03 is to be replaced by the SEPA standards Sepa Direct Debit and Sepa Credit Transfer. Clieop03 is therefore a deprecated standard for communication with the bank, but it is still in use by Progress. The mandate for the direct debit transfer for the tuition fee from the student’s account is generated by the software in Clieop03.
My task was to implement both SEPA standards, SSD and SCT. The rst
standard allows the customer to communicate a le with withdrawal requests
to the bank, the second standard describes crediting transfers. The details of
these standards and the corresponding XML les can be found on the website
of the Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken, www.nvb.nl.
The bene ts of the new standards are various. At this moment the university
can only create direct debits for Dutch accounts, in the near future the university
can charge accounts in the entire SEPA area. Many international students will
bene t from this too, since opening an account in another country requires
much paperwork. Furthermore Clieop03 is a very old text-based standard. It
is antique to use plain text messages, they lack standardization and integrity.
Eciency and extendibility are often not given.
Martien Scheepens
