The European Consumers Organisation, BEUC, issued a press release yesterday as well as the results on a study-excercise about cross border credit-transfers. The good thing is that the organisation acknowledges that their excercise was by no means a full-scale professional test. They've merely asked their member organisations to send payments back and forth.
One of the conclusions is that the Regulation should have been fully implemented in the Netherlands, but that its not. I'm quite curious about that. Having sent and received a number of cross-border payments I noticed that the Regulation is implemented quite well. The BEUC-observation though that Postbank has not adapted its online banking for IBAN (awarding them a prize for the worst technical problem) is hard to deny of course.
The one payment that backfired (with a charge of 25 euro) did so because the IBAN that I entered was incorrrect. And for another payment, filling in the IBAN in the Internet-banking environment of RABO, immediately led to automatic fill in of the address details of the bank of the beneficiary.
So much for my excercise. Needless to say that it would be a good thing to actually do a full scale professional test. All research so far has been anecdotal, while it would be a very good thing to use representative data. We would be happy to execute such a test.
