Travelcard selects UPSS to meet EU legislation for direct debit mandates and SEPA ahead of looming February deadline

National fuel card provider in the Netherlands outsources its enterprise customers’ direct debit mandate management to Unisys subsidiary.

Travelcard selects UPSS to meet EU legislation for direct debit mandates and SEPA ahead of looming February deadline.
 
National fuel card provider in the Netherlands outsources its enterprise customers’ direct debit mandate management to Unisys subsidiary as the EU calls for more action around SEPA compliance.

Unisys Payment Services and Solutions (UPSS), a Dutch subsidiary of Unisys Corporation that delivers outsourced payment services for Dutch and Belgian banks, has announced that it has been selected by Travelcard, a national provider of fuel cards to the Dutch enterprise market, to assist Travelcard with its Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) compliance processes for all enterprise customer registrations and direct debit mandates.
 
Travelcard is accepted by every filling station in the Netherlands and a further 33,000 filling stations across Continental Europe. The company has thousands of enterprise customers in the Netherlands, whose direct debit payments need to comply with the new SEPA regulations.
 
The news of Travelcard’s direct debit mandate compliance for SEPA comes at a time when the Council of the European Union has called on member states, banks and end users to increase their efforts to meet the migration deadline in February 2014 amid concerns many organisations are leaving compliance measures for SEPA too late, leaving them exposed to the risk of payments problems and penalties post-deadline.
 
As of 1 February 2014, the use of local debt collection schemes will no longer be possible for enterprise customers as national schemes will be replaced by the compulsory SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) Scheme in the SEPA countries (the 27 EU member states and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Monaco). Debt collectors are allowed to continue the use of current direct debit mandates for collections from consumer bank accounts, but debt collection from business-to-business (B2B) will require new direct debit mandates to be filled out and signed by the debtor.
 
The Travelcard solution from UPSS
Based on Travelcard data, UPSS will produce mandate requests which will be sent to customers to be signed and returned to UPSS’ service centre in Leusden. UPSS then converts this print mandate into an electronic mandate and sends the electronic version to Travelcard in CSV format. UPSS also informs the customer’s bank  of the new payment details and the mandatory registration of the mandate. UPSS takes care of the process from the design of the mandate documents to the registration in the mandate database and the provision of all mandate data necessary for the FIRST collection file in XML format (XML 20022) by Travelcard; this file is created by UPSS  using PAIN 008 records.
 
“To take this in-house would represent a very labour- and cost-intensive project. We are therefore very pleased with the system and service developed by UPSS and their cooperation in this project”, says René Koek, CFO at Travelcard.