In the past years banks championed for their customers in order to offer them an alternative to payment transactions via receipts such as the "Zahlungsanweisung" employing new technologies such as online-banking; in Austria already more than 4 million account holders utilise online-banking.

Concerning the e-Commerce (e.g. internet shopping) so far no electronic remittance has been realised satisfactorily in want of an international standard. Payment by credit card, by bill and payment slip ("Zahlungsanweisung") or cash on delivery still are very frequent payment methods.

At the conception of the eps e-payment Standard STUZZA set great value upon building on existing standards and not creating a proprietary national solution.

The ePI (electronic Payment Initiator)provides the basis for the eps e-payment Standard. In September 2002 the ECBS (European Committe for Banking Standards, now European Payments Council EPC) announced the ePI as the bank standard.

At the time of the decision to apply the ePI in the eps e-payment Standard the Austrian credit institutes incorporated already in 2002 a standard whose content is compatible with the SWIFT MT103+ and already presets IBAN and BIC among others on an obligatory basis.
Therefore the eps e-payment Standard fulfils the legal criteria for EU-inland payments according to the EU regulation 2560/2001/EC.

In the eps e-payment Standard the optionee (merchant/e-government) creates an ePI
(~ electronic "Zahlungsanweisung") and imparts it to the customer's bank.
The bank imports via interface the electronic "Zahlungsanweisung" directly to the online-banking for the payment execution.
Hence the customer does not have to acquire data for the remittance, but may release the payment immediately to the customer's bank in online-banking.
Finally, the customer's bank sends an electronic confirmation-of-payment message with the status of the expecting remittance to the merchant/e-government.
Therefore, the ePI in the context of the eps e-payment Standard supports continuous end-to-end (STP-straight through process) and real time processes.

The ePI Standard follows international regulations and guidelines

• Compatibility to existing systems, such as SWIFT MT103+, SEPA Credit Transfer
• IBAN as account identification
• BIC as bank identification
• Unitary standard for national and international payment transactions
• Supports all currencies
• No investments for the (end) customer

Syntax

Basically the ePI Standard is syntax-neutral. In the technical description ( SIG605 V1.0)the ePI Standard was described as XML Scheme Syntax according to W3C Standard and therefore follows international devevlopments (e.g. ISO 20022, SEPA).