The General Gist:
You may have heard the acronyms SEPA, BIC or IBAN recently. Have you wondered what they meant but quickly forgotten about them? If so, then you wouldn’t be alone.

SEPA is the Single Euro Payments Area which comprises a total of 32 countries (so far). Its aim is to standardise Euro payments across Europe for businesses and consumers. This comes into full effect from February 1st 2014.

The main things you’ll need to know about are BIC and IBAN numbers:
Business Identifier Code (BIC): a unique identification code for both financial and non-financial institutions. It’s kind of like your bank sort code but it specifies a particular business, country and region all within the one BIC.

International Bank Account Number (IBAN): an international means of identifying bank accounts across national borders. This is what you’ll use instead of your bank account number from February onwards. The format of these is different for every country but for Ireland this one IBAN will contain your country code, sort code and bank account number.

Are you with me so far? The concept isn’t too daunting once you know the basics. However, now you may be thinking that you can simply ignore SEPA and go about your daily routine. I’m afraid not! SEPA is a mandatory EU Regulation so all businesses will have to conform to SEPA by the 1st February 2014. Bank account numbers and sort codes will be a thing of the past and replaced with IBAN and BIC for all businesses in Europe.

Now for the Hard Part:
Irish Life has been around for a long time (1939 to be exact), so you can imagine that bank accounts and sort codes have been part of our business processes for eons. With the introduction of SEPA we now have to convert all of our systems and processes to be in line with European regulations. It’s similar to Y2K in the sense that organisations Europe wide need to check and upgrade heavily integrated features of their IT systems before a fixed date. No small task!

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