White Paper on SEPA Card Clearing

The clearing of card based transactions through ACH based clearing methods is an important part of the domestic clearing volume in many countries throughout the SEPA region. The SEPA payment infrastructure defined by EPC does not support yet the clearing of card based transactions. The Berlin Group has started to work on business process definitions and message formats for such a SEPA Card Clearing Scheme. This Clearing Scheme is meant to support all SEPA compliant card schemes and is strictly separated from card scheme rules, a fact which supports an unbundling of processing and card scheme management. The main decisions and characteristics of such a clearing scheme as a workpath is described in a White Paper issued on the web-site of the Berlin Group.