Speakers from Token.io, the European Payments Council (EPC), FDATA Global and Mastercard discussed the timeline of the incoming SEPA Payment Account Access (SPAA) scheme in Europe and the potential commercial opportunities it presents, at Open Banking Expo UK & Europe.
Giorgio Andreoli, director general of the EPC, told attendees that its SPAA scheme “started from the results of PSD2 access-to-account”, by which he meant that “European banks invested more than €3 billion for implementing PSD2 Open Banking and the return was not satisfactory, with less than 2% of users adopting that”.
Asked to explain what SPAA is, Andreoli said: “First, it’s a scheme, so it’s a multilateral obligation with a clear liability attribution to all the actors which are part of the scheme, which is very important.
“Secondly, a set of premium features on top of the basic PSD2, including notably payment certainty mechanism and dynamic recurring payments, which is the continental version of variable recurring payments.
“And third, in the inter-PSP space, a viable model which basically provides for the equivalent of an interchange fee – so, actually allowing commercial players to build on top of that.”
He was joined on the panel discussion, titled ‘SPAA: Unlocking commercial Open Banking within European payments’, by Robert Sullivan, public policy and strategy director at Token.io, Ghela Boskovich, head of Europe at FDATA Global and Dr Louise Beaumont, senior vice president, global Open Banking & Open Finance industry & policy engagement at Mastercard.
Boskovich explained that a two-stage pilot will soon get underway, with an initial technical pilot “that may actually start this year”, while the second stage of the SPAA pilot “is about testing the commercial model” and is likely to start in either the second or third quarter of 2025.
“It’s stress-testing the rulebook that’s been put together and fine-tuning some of those commercial arrangements,” she said.
“So ideally, by the end of next year, we’d have something that could go into production and that would be able to be more widely adopted across the market.”
In January this year, account-to-account payment infrastructure provider Token.io joined the SPAA scheme, becoming only the second company to do so at the time.
“As a business, we’re particularly interested in the dynamic recurring payment functionality, which is broadly equivalent to VRP,” said Sullivan, speaking on the panel.
“We have been very enthusiastic supporters of the SPAA scheme for a number of years, [and] have been closely involved in its development during that time.”
He observed the speed with which the EPC had worked to develop the scheme.
“In the time that the UK has been talking about a premium VRP scheme, through the EPC, Europe’s gone ahead and built a premium Open Banking scheme. In terms of the UK’s assertions around leading in Open Banking, I think this is an evidence point really pushing back against that.”
‘Path to Open Finance’
Boskovich called SPAA “a template starting point to inform how other use cases across different data verticals within financial services can be delivered in a commercial manner”, referring to the move to Open Finance.
Mastercard’s Beaumont explained: “We’re on the path to Open Finance, and getting Open Banking on a commercially viable footing is a key step on that journey.
“Which means we’ve got to accept some pretty fundamental things, one of which is that consumers have a right to access their data and share it to power the services that they want to use. And if you accept that, you’ve also got to accept that a data-sharing economy is a core building block of the EU’s commercial future – which means that companies (data holders and data brokers) need to learn how to make data sharing profitable.”
Adoption of SPAA
Andreoli said that, for the scheme to work optimally, “both the supply side and the demand side” need to participate.
He added that slower adoption by European banks “should have been expected” on the basis of their size and more complex budgeting process.
His expectation is that more banks are planning to invest and that there will be “much more action in 2026”.
“I think the other big consideration is, in Europe, a lot of the banks are currently in the midst of implementing the instant payments regulation and banks are in various stages of their journey. But that is taking a lot of development resource,” said Token.io’s Sullivan.
He sees the instant payments regulation as “a foundational layer” under SPAA that will “really drive some of the enhanced functionality that we see through SPAA”.
Sullivan added: “Some of the new functionality that SPAA brings will be of genuine benefit to a lot of banks’ customers and it unlocks new use cases.”
Watch Mastercard’s Louise Beaumont speaking live from the show floor at Open Banking Expo UK & Europe on 15-16 October in London.
Main image L-R: Ellie Duncan, head of content at Open Banking Expo; Giorgio Andreoli, director general at the European Payments Council; Dr Louise Beaumont, senior vice president, global Open Banking & Open Finance industry & policy engagement at Mastercard; Ghela Boskovich, head of Europe at FDATA Global; and Robert Sullivan, public policy and strategy director at Token.io
