SAP: C’est chic, c’est magnifique!

SAP AG is no Europhobe. To prove it, SAP representatives have announced it will provide enhancements to mySAP ERP to assist businesses and banks worldwide in “reap[ing] the benefits of the upcoming Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) to increase the efficiency of cross-border electronic payments within Europe.”

According to those fantastic folks at Wikipedia, the SEPA initiative “involves the creation of a zone for the Euro in which all electronic payments are considered domestic, and where a difference between national and international payments does not exist. … This will replace the complex and costly national infrastructures that are currently in operation in each domestic market, thus reducing the overall cost to the European economy of moving capital around the region (estimated today as 2.5%-3% of total GDP).”

(If you ask Das Chump, a denizen of the EU himself, it sounds like quite a bit of bureaucratic hell but, hey, technological advancement doesn’t care, does it?)

The European Payments Council is currently putting finishing touches on the legal framework for payment systems. In 2008, says current EU law, pan-European payment options for credit transfers and personal debit transactions must be in place for EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. By 2011, EU guidelines call for “all present national payment infrastructures and payment processors [to] be in full competition to increase efficiency through consolidation and economies of scale.”

Back to Europe then (well sort of), SAP has also established that its brain trust are no dummies: There’s some good Euros to be made in this business in the short term, pardner!

SAP plans to make the package available in mid-2007 for existing SAP customers that are current on SAP maintenance contracts and running SAP’s enterprise resource planning application, SAP R/3 Enterprise or higher. SAP also promised support in the future to customers coming under the regime of the SEPA initiative, with additional functionality to mySAP ERP 2005, namely SAP Bank Relationship Management, an application to increase payment-flow transparency and compliance of corporate payment transactions.

Oddly enough, the announcement was made from Sydney, Australia.