SCT stands for "SEPA Credit Transfer".

The history of SEPA Credit Transfer goes back to 2008, when it was introduced by the European Payment Council. The EPC is a non-profit organization representing payment service providers (PSPs) and setting standards for European payment integration and development.

SCT enables PSPs to manage international payment processing and to offer it to merchants as a credit transfer service within the 34 Single European Payments Area participant countries. To be able to do this, a PSP has to be a formal participant in the SEPA scheme. The payments are processed in EUR currency. With SCT, customers can transfer funds to any beneficiary account in SEPA in the form of a non-urgent one-time bank transfer.

SDD stands for "SEPA Direct Debit".

The SEPA Direct Debit enables consumers and businesses to make cross-border direct debit payments in EUR currency. Accounts may be held in any SEPA currency, but the transfer of funds between them is always in euros. The basis for collecting money is a signed authorization (mandate) given to the creditor by the debtor. While making a purchase, a customer has to submit their bank account data (name of the account owner, IBAN and BIC) and agree to be charged. After that happens, it is the merchant who initiates the transaction. If you want your business to handle recurring payments and charge your clients by automatically collecting money from their accounts, direct debit is the best solution.

Zero friction supports both SCT and SDD payments.

On the customer detail page, we can define if the customer will use SCT or SDD for paying the bills. If SDD is used, a mandate has to be created as well.

With SCT, the customer pays via manual bank transfer with the payment reference mentioned on the invoicing documents. When the bank files are imported into Zero Friction, we can match the incoming payment(s) by the customer with the corresponding invoice. If no payment has been made by the customer, Zero Friction can start sending out reminders.

With SDD, the customer pays via automatic direct debet. Zero friction will generate an outgoing banktransaction file to be uploaded to the bank. This file contains the SDD request towards the customer's bank. On the collection day, the amount will be automatically taken from the customer's account and the user has to upload the banktransaction file from the bank into the system. As such we can match that incoming banktransaction file with the outgoing transaction file and the invoice will change to the status of paid. IF the customer refuses to pay the amount from the SDD transaction, we will receive the information from the bank of this reversal. As such the invoice status will change to overdue and reminders can automatically be send out to the customer .

The parameters of SDD are configured on the payments configuration page. The user can specify the SDD payment delay (for example 6 days after approval of the invoice) and if we are going to allow an SDD payment retry in case of a reversal by the customer or insufficient funds.

For each SDD to work, a separate mandate has to be created in Zero Friction. This is done on the customer's detail page under banking details. Upon creating the mandate, you can specify a date from when it should be active. All invoices approved from that day on will be billed using the SDD payment method.

Each customer can have a list of bank accounts. It is important that the one being used for paying the invoices is selected as the default account for that customer. This way the incoming payments will be automatically matched in Zero Friction, without the user having to do this manually.