Europayment

EU and EEA countries have introduced so-called “Europayments”. These are cross-border payments in EUR up to EUR 50,000 that are processed via the STEP2 system under precisely defined rules.

Payment instructions for Europayments must satisfy the following conditions:

a) correctly entered IBAN (International Bank Account Number) of the beneficiary,
b) correctly entered BIC (Bank Identifier Code = SWIFT code) of the beneficiary’s bank,
c)  assignment of bank charges as “SHA” (shared = fees of sending bank paid by the payer, fees of receiving bank paid by the beneficiary), and
d)  containing no special handling instructions (i.e. no code words entered in the field “Information for the bank” in electronic and internet banking applications).

If only one of these conditions is not observed in the payment order, the payment cannot be considered a Europayment, but it is instead a standard foreign payment order that will be processed and charged as such. A Europayment order can be delivered to the bank also in paper form. In such case, a fee for the manual processing of the order will be charged in addition to the fee charged for the Europayment.

Europayment brings with it the following advantages:

Savings in the fees you pay

• A reduced fee for outgoing Europayments
  
•  A reduced fee for incoming Europlayments

Savings in fees paid by your business partners in the European Monetary Union (EMU)

• If your business partner’s account is maintained in a member country of the EMU, the beneficiary will only pay a fee for the incoming cross-border payment equal to the fee for a domestic incoming payment in the respective country.

Accelerated payment execution

• A correctly entered Europayment order is processed via the STEP2 system, which is faster than a standard correspondent transfer and hence the beneficiary receives it earlier.