Danish community chooses EBA CLEARING’s STEP2 for processing bulk payments in Danish kroner

STEP2 DKK scheduled to go live in November 2026.

By using the STEP2 infrastructure for both SEPA and kroner payments, Danish payment service providers (PSPs) will be able to streamline operations and minimise cost.

EBA CLEARING and Finans Danmark (FIDA) are collaborating to operate the new STEP2 DKK Service for the processing of retail account-to-account bulk payments in Danish kroner. The service is a copy of EBA CLEARING’s STEP2 SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) Service.

STEP2 DKK will be operated by Clearing Services (CS), a subsidiary of FIDA. The new service will go live in November 2026. All Danish PSPs are already connected to the service and engaged in testing activities.  The Danish community’s migration from the existing clearing system to STEP2 DKK is expected to be completed by April 2027.

“We are very pleased to partner up with a well-established, highly resilient infrastructure provider for the clearing of our national bulk payment traffic. STEP2 DKK will offer our community the best of two worlds: standardised pan-European payment rails and the assurance of continued local customer support provided by Clearing Services under the agreed operating model with EBA CLEARING,” said Line Munkholm Haukrogh, CEO of Clearing Services.

“By building on existing and proven infrastructure, STEP2 DKK meets the needs of the Danish community, while keeping operational complexity and investments to a minimum. Furthermore, STEP2 DKK will create economies of scale, not just for the Danish PSPs, which already use STEP2 for their euro payments, but also for the STEP2 community at large,” said Kasper Sylvest, Danske Bank, Chairman of Clearing Services.

“We are delighted to announce this collaboration with the Danish payments community at EBAday here in Copenhagen. With STEP2 DKK, the Danish PSPs will be leveraging the investments they made in the pan-European STEP2 infrastructure for their Danish kroner payments. EBA CLEARING stands ready to support other national communities evaluating a similar approach,” said Hays Littlejohn, CEO of EBA CLEARING.

As a cornerstone of the SEPA processing infrastructure, STEP2 provides full reach for SEPA Credit Transfers and Direct Debits to over 4,800 payment service providers across all SEPA countries. The system handles euro payments in bulk files and processes over 70 million transactions per day on average.