UTRECHT, The Netherlands, April 8 /PRNewswire/ --

- Simple and Efficient Exchange of SEPA Payments Between CSMs

The payment processor and clearing house Equens successfully exchanged
the first SEPA transactions based on EACHA's(1) Interoperability Framework 
with Iberpay, Spain and Seceti, Italy today. The parties are the first from 
a group of CSMs(2) that announced in October 2007 establishing 
interoperability between each other. More bilateral interoperability 
agreements are expected to go live within the coming weeks.

Bilateral exchange of payments between CSMs will enable the simple and
efficient exchange of SEPA payments between CSM communities and other
paticipants (such as banks and their customers) in the payment chain.
Whenever a bank connected to Equens dispatches payments to another bank
connected to Seceti or Iberpay, the payments can be routed completely within
the systems of the companies without using an external centralized
infractructure. This also means that the sending bank doesn't need to
participate in the infrastructure to which the receiving bank is connected
to.

Michael Steinbach, Chairman of Equens' Board of Directors: "Linking the
communities of our CSMs will benefit our clients in numerous ways. We offer
them cost efficiency by operating on existing infrastructures as well as
speed through same day settlement thanks to synchronized cut-off times and
freedom of choice." Furthermore, the CSM service through bilateral links
complies to industry standards such as European Payment Council (EPC) Scheme
Rulebooks and Implementation Guidelines, the UNIFI message sets and the
PEACH/CSM framework. It's also secure by using TARGET2 for settlement and
using settlement accounts held by central banks or, in the future, settlement
accounts based on the fiduciary account principle as described by the EACHA
framework.

With actually establishing the connection to Iberpay and Seceti, Equens
once more substantiates its role as a leading European player and its
dedication to bring benefits to its clients.

(1) EACHA is the European Automated Clearing House Association

(2) CSMs are Clearing & Settlement Mechanisms

Editorial note

Equens is the first truly pan-European, full-service payment processor.
As one of the largest and most innovative payment processors in Europe,
Equens is leading the market for future-proof payments and debit card
processing solutions. Thanks to an extensive and competitive service
portfolio and a flexible, customer-orientated approach, the company
seamlessly meets the requirements of the European payments market. With an
annual volume of 7.3 billion payments and 2.1 billion POS and ATM
transactions, Equens has a market share of more than 15% within the eurozone.
By continuously pursuing further growth and translating the achieved synergy
benefits and economies of scale into advantages for the customer, the company
contributes to the efficiency of European payments.

For additional information, please visit http://www.equens.com