Payment Centre
ACH Finland is a payment and clearing centre providing payment transfers from its customers to other banks. Vice versa ACHF transfers payment transactions from other banks to its customer banks, to be further booked on customer accounts. Typical payment transactions to be transferred are invoice payments, recurring payments, direct debits, salaries paid by companies or organisations, pensions and express payments.
An essential part of payment transfer is the payment cover transfer between banks. The banks cover all sent payment transactions to the receiver bank. The reciever bank books the payment transaction to the customer's account after a successfull payment cover transfer. ACHF provides payment cover calculation as part of its services.
Our core comptence is to understand and proved the best of breed clearing services to our customers. We can help our customer to improve their payments services and to be on the competitive edge by providing payment services of high quality and cost effectively.
SEPA
The objective of the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) is to standardize the payment practice in different countries. Within the area bank customers are able to pay and receive doestic and international Euro payments with the same conditions, rights and obligations. From a bank customer's perspective of view the change is recognised by the introduction of BIC codes an IBAN numbers. A BIC code is used for identifying a bank and the IBAN numer is the customer's account number.
The movement from national payment practices to a common payment area will happen gradually and after 2010 there will no longer be any difference between domestic and international Euro paymet transactions. Banks in Finland are already transferring SEPA credit transfers using BIC codes and IBAN account numbers.
ACH Finland will bring cost effective SEPA payment transaction handling to banks.