BBVA, Deutsche Bank and Fortis are the first banks to have successfully completed testing procedures for credit transfers as defined in the Sepa testing programme.

Throughout July and August 2007, BBVA, Deutsche Bank and Fortis have executed a comprehensive programme including testing outbound messages in order to ensure the ability of their application to generate SEPA payments as well as inbound messages to check the robustness of their payment engine when receiving valid and invalid SEPA payment messages.

As part of this testing, various tools and procedures designed within the context of the Sepa testing programme were used. These included Smart Test Messages, STaQS (SwiftTesting and Qualification Service) as well as reference data directories.

As a result of these tests, BBVA, Deutsche Bank and Fortis have announced that they are fully ready to send and receive SEPA compliant credit transfer payments.