SEPA Direct Debit (Creditor flow)

A total of 36 countries, including all EU member states, are signed up to the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) scheme. This scheme facilitates payments among individuals and businesses. While the technical mechanisms for the two types of payer are largely the same, there are big differences in the amount of protection provided for payers, as well as slightly stricter rules on mandate collection, when it comes to business to business payments.

Whereas SEPA CORE provides a lot of protection for payers including very generous payment rejection and recall rules, the SEPA B2B scheme is designed more to provide security and stability for the receiver of a payment; once a payment has gone through, that is that, and all reconciliation must be made directly between the two parties and not via the bank processing the payment. Additionally, the timeline for B2B payments is shorter, with payments being submitted one working day before they are due, rather than the up to five days allowed under the SEPA CORE rules.

Offsetting this finality of payment, the rules about mandate collection are somewhat stricter in B2B payments with the debtor needing to provide two signed mandates, one to their bank and one to the creditor, ensuring that both parties are in complete agreement with the conditions of the recurring or one-off direct debit before it is transacted.

Example use case

A European business client of your bank purchases goods from a supplier, also located within mainland Europe, and is issued an invoice, in Euros, for the sale with a due date at the first of the following month along with two SEPA Mandates, one to return to the debtor and one to provide to you to confirm and authorise the payment.

Prerequisites

• A transaction channel for SEPA payments must be set up in your Mambu instance
• Schedulers for SEPA B2B payments must have been configured in the Mambu Payment Gateway (MPG)
• The creditor must have an associated Creditor Identifier
• The creditor account in Mambu must be mapped to an IBAN
• The debtor bank account must be identified as a business with a valid Creditor Identifier and not a private individual's account

Steps

1. The creditor provides a signed mandate for the payment, which can be attached to their account in Mambu using the user interface or API.

2. At least one business day before the payment an API call is made to the /collections API. By default, a SEPA CORE Direct Debit will be initiated. If you want to initiate a SEPA B2B transaction, make sure that the localInstrument field is set to B2B. If sending payment details more than one business day before the expected transaction date, the requestedExecutionDate or requestedExecutionTime fields must be provided in your API call.

   {
       "serviceLevel": "SEPA",
       "localInstrument": "B2B",
       "instructedAmount": {
   	    "amount": "2500",
   	    "currency": "EUR"
       },
       "purposeCode": "Invoice #2020-08-534",
       "requestedExecutionDate": "2020-10-01",
       "paymentIdentification": {
   	    "endToEndIdentification": "202008534abc123def456"
       },
       "creditorName": "Business Client",
       "creditorAddress": {
   	    "buildingNumber": "12",
   	    "city": "Madarcelona",
   	    "countryCode": "ES",
   	    "postalCode": "1BD 2PR",
   	    "street": "Main Street"
       },
       "creditorAccount": {
   	    "currency": "EUR",
   	    "identification": {
   		    "iban": "ES3821005222656462935915"
   	    }
       },
       "debtorName": "Business Products R Us",
       "debtorAddress": {
   	    "buildingNumber": "86",
   	    "city": "Champino",
   	    "countryCode": "FR",
   	    "postalCode": "24450",
   	    "street": "Scarlet Street"
       },
       "debtorAccount": {
   	    "currency": "EUR",
   	    "identification": {
   		    "iban": "FR9714508000503718333273E30"
   	    }
       }
   }
   

   Check our API documentation for more information on all these fields.

3. The payment will be created and marked as PENDING, appearing in the SEPA DD Pending page of the MPG.

4. If the payment has been requested between 14 and 1 day in advance of the actual requested execution date, on the next time the scheduler is configured to run, Mambu will generate a PACS.003 message and send it through the SEPA Callout.
   

5. On the actual requested execution date, a withdrawal transaction will be created in Mambu to reflect the amount being transferred. The Mambu transaction will use the SEPA DD transaction channel, contain a reference to the end2end reference ID provided in the endToEndIdentification of the request to the /collections API and will have been created by the Collections API user created when setting up your MPG integration.

6. As SEPA B2B does not allow for recall of collections after they have been made, there is no possibility for the creditor or their bank to charge back or reverse the collection, although it can be rejected by the debtor for up to two working days after the settlement date, in which case the payment will be marked as rejected in the MPG and a further transaction recorded in the client's account, this time crediting the amount of the original transaction.