European Payments Council

What it does

The EPC is not a commercial firm. It is an international non-profit association under Belgian law, and its By-laws (document EPC148-19, English version 2.1) fund it from two sources. First, membership: article 4.9 requires each EPC Member, and each Associate Member, to pay membership fees per year, proposed by the Director General in consultation with the Audit Committee and decided by the General Assembly, with the amount and the calculation method set each year against the activity modules, the relevant costs and the number of members and, where applicable, scheme participants; members may also be charged additional contributions. Second, scheme management: article 13 provides that to meet a fair and equitable proportion of the expenses incurred in relation to scheme management the EPC may levy fees from the scheme participants under the relevant scheme management governance documents. The EPC's published fee schedule shows what that means in practice: for 2026 an individual scheme participant pays a flat EUR 649 for each of the SCT, SCT Inst, SDD Core and SDD B2B schemes it adheres to, EUR 2,596 for all four, nothing for OCT Inst, plus a EUR 1,845 annual Verification of Payee scheme participation fee and, for new VOP participants, a one-off EUR 1,774 EPC Directory Service set-up fee, with banded amounts for declared groups of PSPs. Invoices go out in the first quarter of each year and must be settled by a SEPA payment instrument.