SEPA Benefits for the merchant
The merchants need are actually some way to transfer the money from the customer to the merchant bank account. Today the majority of these money transfers in Europe are made using a payment card. In some European countries cash is still king and there are a few countries that still uses checks. The merchant needs to offer a payment service that the customer can use without any friction. If there are to much friction for a customer the risk is that the customer leave the store without buying anything. If the customer doesn’t want to buy it shouldn’t be because of lacking the right payment service. Card payment is such a payment service that the customers have accepted and in most countries expect to exist in a store. From the merchant perspective this is an expensive service that has high cost in fees to the acquirer. From a day to day business perspective there is a need for administration of the payments and to reconcile the actual sales with the actual money transfer to merchant account. Some merchants uses technical solutions to ease up this administration and integrate the payment solution into their sales and accounting systems. Usually these projects are quite complex including knowledge from point of sales, accounting and security. In the end the cost for IT support systems will be quit high compared to delivered functionality. For those merchants acting on several markets in Europe, the situation is even more complex when one solution in one country cannot be reused in another country.
With SEPA this is going to change and the requirements are that a SEPA payment card shall be possible to use in all SEPA countries. The card schema shall support EMV and the same goes for the terminal. This will eliminate country local payment cards and this process is long gone and most local cards are exchange to Visa V Pay Debit or Mastercard Maestro Debit. The consolidation of terminal vendors have been ongoing for several years now. The terminal vendors will provide the same terminal for all European countries. At the same time Payment Service Providers have started to marketing solutions that will work in several countries. The same movements have been noticed by Acquirers that are growing both by acquiring other companies and organically to other countries.
The competition increases on the market which is the goal from the European Central Bank put on SEPA. A merchant that has the knowledge on the market can position itself with the right supplier of the payment technology for that country, combined with the market knowledge of which acquirers that wants to enter the market and push prices.
I think that there is a market window where international merchants can lower the total cost for card payments noticeably in some markets using the right information and strategy for there IT Solution and management of acquiring contracts.
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