Seán Kyne (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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60. To ask the Minister for Finance the assistance available to small-to-medium sized companies in preparing for the single european payments area which will impact greatly on a company's ability to compete successfully in the European marketplace; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [48310/13]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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The aim of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) project is to create a single market for euro-denominated retail payments. SEPA is an EU initiative that will change the way that these payments are processed across Europe. SEPA will allow payment systems users to make euro-denominated retail electronic payments to payees located in any of the participating countries, using a single payment account and a single set of payment instruments SEPA comes into full effect on 1 February 2014 and businesses will need to ensure that payroll, direct debit and accounting systems are SEPA-ready.

The implementation of SEPA within Ireland is overseen by the National Payments Plan (NPP) Steering Committee, which was established in 2012 to modernise the way payments are made in Ireland. In this regard, an NPP-SEPA sub-group has been formed, consisting of representatives of consumers, businesses, Government and banks. This sub group provides an avenue for the discussion of any issues that arise in the process of migrating to SEPA.

I understand from the Central Bank that there is considerable assistance available to the SME sector in the context of migrating their payment business to SEPA.

A national information campaign using radio, internet and national newspapers has been run in the current year, in parallel with similar campaigns run by some of the banks providing retail payment services in Ireland.

The ‘www.readyforsepa.ie’ website has also been set up to provide SEPA-related information to corporates of all sizes as well as to individual consumers. All of the banks providing retail payment services in Ireland have comprehensive SEPA information on their websites, as does the Irish Payment Services Organisation, the representative body for the payments industry in Ireland.

A series of presentations on SEPA has also been made over the course of this year to the SME sector, in conjunction with representative bodies such as ISME, Chambers Ireland, IBEC, etc.

All SMEs have at this stage been contacted by their banks about SEPA migration, and the banks all have dedicated SEPA migration teams in place to help their customers move to the new payment standards introduced by SEPA. Providers of payments software packages to the SME sector are also available to assist in the SEPA migration process.

It is also noteworthy that not all SMEs will be affected by SEPA - only those who submit bulk payment files to their banks for processing, of which there are about 30,000.