Stet

Notwithstanding the current debate as to how fast SEPA payment instruments will gain market share, we believe SEPA and domestic instruments will co-exist for a while yet, and both need to be supported.

We believe in servicing the European market

Though initially founded and developed for the French market, STET’s European market approach is not parochial. Indeed, we aim to help the European banking community in moving toward a more efficient processing of interbank payments.

Building a new ACH from scratch STET was free to explore new technological approaches. With multi-CSM as a key requirement, STET was able to create and develop a flexible, parameter-driven CSM engine. In effect, different sets of payment instruments, along with different processing rules, can co-exist within one system.

For the French market, we developed a flexible, parameter-driven CSM system and used it to implement SCTs and SDDs. We then added and transitioned all existing French instruments to this system.

STET is now operating two different schemes within the same engine and could easily add additional schemes while maintaining the full advantage of processing large volumes.

Thanks to our common platform able to host different CSMs, it then becomes possible to consolidate volumes, gain economies of scale, and lower processing prices, without awaiting a significant decrease in the number of processing schemes.

As the European retail payment infrastructure, STET is an ideal partner for European banking communities and banks and can also act as a processor offering its software or processing capabilities to an existing processor on a white label basis.

Acting as a processor for an existing CSM, STET ensures that full control of the scheme would to remain with the CSM. Suitable governance can be negotiated to fulfil this goal. This has been done in France, where a detailed set of formal governance ensures that shareholders do not have more control over the processing rules than non-shareholder participants.

STET is already the leading retail payment infrastructure in Europe with an annual production volume of 13 billion transactions. Our state-of-the-art system provides tailored services and excellent risk control at the lowest market cost.

Through a unique combination of wide features and large economies of scale, we believe we are well positioned to serve a wider portion of the European market.