Overview
On 28 January 2008 CORE was launched to process SEPA credit transfers. It enables French banks to exchange SEPA credit transfers at the national level.
CORE also replaced the former retail payment infrastructure – SIT – for the exchange of all national payment instruments. These payment instruments migrated from SIT to CORE between June and October 2008.
At the end of October 2008 CORE became the sole retail infrastructure in France for the exchange, clearing and settlement of all dematerialised payment instruments, i.e. national instruments and SEPA credit transfers.
CORE is operated by the STET company (Systèmes Technologiques d’Echange et de Traitement), which was set up in December 2004 by six French banks. It is a multilateral-netting payment system that processes transactions between participants in three stages:
- continuous exchange of payment orders between banks’ IT centres and CORE’s technical platform,
- multilateral netting of orders by CORE,
- settlement of net balances in TARGET2-Banque de France (CORE is a deferred net payment system).
The retail payment system processed 12.5 billion transactions in 2008, worth a total EUR 5,261 billion. It is Europe’s largest retail payment system in volume and value terms.
Payment instruments processed in the retail system(1)
In 2003 card payments became the number-one interbank payment instrument processed by the retail system. They accounted for 39.4% in volume terms of all transactions processed by the system in 2008. Cheques are the second largest payment instrument in the retail system, accounting for 22.5% in volume terms. Then, there is the share of credit transfers – 15.2% in volume terms – and the one of direct debits – 16.1% in volume terms.
(1)Source: Source: GSIT, STET data. The statistics given are those for 2008.
