The “QR-Bill Light” in SEPA

Required knowledge

• Application of the QR-bill Implementation Guidelines

The European Payments Council (EPC) has established guidelines on how to simplify data collection in Europe for initiating a SEPA credit transfer with a standardized QR code. Over fewer than five pages, the document describes a payment instruction with which the transferring party can easily initiate the payment process by scanning the QR code.

Similar Use Cases

Compared to the QR-bill, where a full 150 pages are dedicated to the technical and functional specifications, the EPC’s QR code is a lightweight, a kind of “QR-bill light.” Although it is directly comparable to the Swiss QR-bill in terms of its use cases, beyond this it is restricted to the absolute minimum. For example, the EPC standard does not include any requirements for the visual design and so does not require any information or functions that are not essential for a transfer. There are no characteristics equivalent to the QR-IBAN, the QR reference, the ultimate debtor, or alternative procedures anywhere to be found (table 1).

Like the QR-bill, the EPC QR code is suitable for use cases where the transfer information stored in the QR code also appears in the plain text. This allows the paying party to check that the data recorded in the QR code is correct.

For use cases where the beneficiary provides a QR code to the paying party at the point of interaction (e.g., at a payment terminal in a store or in the shopping basket for an online retailer), EPC recommends a different QR code, which is described in the EPC standard “Standardisation of QR-codes for Mobile Initiated SEPA (Instant) Credit Transfers.”

Just as for the QR-bill, under EPC the process begins with the beneficiary indicating the QR code on an invoice. After receiving the invoice, the paying party scans the QR code using their smartphone or another device through the appropriate function in their payment/banking app. This way, the payment details in the QR code are automatically copied to the right fields in the payment app. Before the paying party approves this, it verifies the transaction data in the payment app to release the payment transaction.

Light Years Ahead

The EPC document is purely informative. This means that invoice issuers and payment service providers are under no obligation to implement the standard. Thanks to the nationwide introduction of the QR-bill in fall 2022 and extensive standardization, Switzerland is light years ahead of the other SEPA countries. Time will tell whether the QR-bill is visionary. This also depends on whether the EPC will add similar functions to its QR code in the future.

Table 1: Comparing the QR-bill and EPC QR code

Table 2: The EPC QR code

Peter Ruoss
Product Owner Payment Software Partnerships, UBS Switzerland AG