On 24 September 2026 the Board of the European Payments Council (EPC) approved the start of development of EPC SCARLET, the Strong Customer Authentication Acceptance Rulebook and Liability Framework for EUDIW Transactions. The EPC announced the decision on 19 October 2026. SCARLET is meant to give the 3,000+ payment service providers (PSPs) and the 27+…
The EPC OCT Inst scheme has been live since 28 November 2023, and on 15 September 2026 the European Payments Council hosted its OCT Inst in Action webinar with payment service and infrastructure providers that were implementing or already offering OCT Inst-based services. If your firm uses the OCT Inst scheme for an international instant…
On 11 September 2026 the European Payments Council (EPC) published a small web tool with an outsized job: the Instant Credit Transfer Scheme Selector. It addresses an operational classification question for instant-payment design: does the use case fall under the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme, the One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst)…
On 11 September 2026 the European Payments Council opened a public consultation on version 0.1 of the proposed FRIDA scheme rulebook. The consultation period runs from 11 September to 10 December 2026. FRIDA, the FRaud Information Distribution Arrangement, is the EPC’s proposed scheme for exchanging fraud data between payment service providers on account-to-account transactions across…
On 9 September 2026 the European Payments Council (EPC) removed the fixed end date it had set for unstructured customer addresses in SEPA payments. Its Payment Scheme Management Board (PSMB) decided to delay the 15 November 2026 sunset of the unstructured address format across all five EPC payment scheme rulebooks, and support for unstructured addresses…
On 28 August 2026 the European Payments Council (EPC) confirmed that its 15 November 2026 end-date for the fully unstructured address format in SEPA scheme messages still stands. The confirmation landed one day after Swift said, on 27 August 2026, that it would extend the migration period for structured addresses in cross-border ISO 20022 payment…
If your bank went live with Verification of Payee on 5 October 2025 and then quietly assumed the work was finished, the next eighteen months will surprise you. The scheme that PSPs built against is already moving. A version 1.1 of the rulebook is published, a version 2.0 is out for consultation, and the matching…
If your institution adhered to the SEPA Request-to-Pay scheme on an older rulebook and then left the change log unread, the SEPA Request-to-Pay Rulebook v4.0 is the version that quietly resets several of your operational assumptions. The functional flow looks the same. The participation mechanics do not. From the entry-into-force date, the way you register…