Dovetail, Intesa complete bank test for European payments

Payments and liquidity management provider Dovetail wants to make sure banks in the euro zone have the systems in place to allow business customers to take advantage of new options for sending and receiving payments later this year.

Dovetail says it has completed tests with Italian bank partner Intesa Sanpaolo, making it the first vendor to offer a payments gateway and processing for users of the Euro Banking Association Clearing system to comply with the real-time SEPA Credit Transfer Instant system of the European Payments Council.

The new SEPA scheme and the EBA Clearing infrastructure are scheduled to go live at the same time in November. Intesa Sanpaola is the first of the various institutions funding the new EBA Clearing solution to connect to the system.

In providing the platform to operate on the new systems, Intesa Sanpaolo's work with London-based Dovetail will also handle the ISO 20022 messaging standard that provides more remittance data with the payment. The standard also applies to most cross-border and business-to-business payments and is considered a key element of any faster payments schemes.

"All Dovetail solutions are built to support real-time payments," Martin Coen, CEO of Dovetail, stated in an April 20 press release. "We continue to expand our support for real-time schemes worldwide as markets and our customers require."

Dovetail also has offices in the U.S., Canada and Singapore.

Intesa Sanpaolo points to its upgraded payments hub as a key for being prepared to connect to the new real-time payments scheme.

"We have been significantly investing in our payment architecture and applications over the past few years in order to be more innovative and agile, and to be able to take advantage of the new opportunities arising in this business," Enrico Bagnasco, head of IT at the bank, stated in the release.