Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Recently, the COFACE decided to downgrade the mark that this institution gives to
evaluate financial risks of a country, to the USA. The country received the note A1
due to several reasons:
- The signs of slowing down of the American economy multiply (3, 3 % growth in
2006 and 2, 4 % planned in 2007).
- The difficulties of the residential real estate market are likely to spread to the whole
economy and affect the consumption of households
- An access more difficult to the credit for the most fragile companies that could lead
to an increase of non-payments and failures.
In Europe, since 2005, risks of payments have been growing. In average, companies
have been paid within 17 days late.
Behind this trend, situations can be different according to the country. To decode
that, Intrum Justitia assigns to each country a payment risk index which summarizes
all local settings affecting the creditor companies (average, delays settlement
payment delays, losses on bad debt...).
However, the European community wants to set up a single way of payment: the
Single Euro Payments Area.
The SEPA project will provide new instruments of payment that will allow making
transfers in all the SEPA area as easy as if it was in a national level.
It involves the creation of a zone in which all electronic payments are considered
domestic, and where a difference between countries part of Europe does not exist.
The goal of this project is to improve the efficiency of cross border payments and
turn the fragmented national markets for euro payments into a single domestic one:
SEPA will allow customers to make payments to anyone situated anywhere in the
area using only a single bank account and a single instrument of payment.
The project includes the development of common instruments, procedures, and
infrastructure to facilitate economies of scale.
Since January 2008, banks are pushing customers to use this new payment
instruments. By 2010, the majority should be on the SEPA framework. As a result,
banks will need to invest a lot in technology to be able to carry on SEPA payment
instruments.
For Multi-national companies and banks, SEPA will offer the opportunity to secure
their payments dealing out onto common platforms across the Eurozone. For
consumers and companies, SEPA could mean cheaper, more efficient and faster
payments transfer when moving Euro from one Eurozone country to another. 32
countries will take part of SEPA.
SEPA have various objectives:
Standardization of payments:
This will take place with an equal limit of time, fraud levels, processes There won't
be differences between national and international payments in the SEPA area.