On 27 October 2022, the European Payments Council (EPC) announced that they have published version 1.1 of the 2023 EPC SEPA Instant Credit Transfer rulebook and related document on the SCT Inst maximum amount.

This version of the rulebook replaces, with immediate effect, version 1.0 of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook, published in May 2022. The EPC has made the following changes in order to help all SCT Inst participants and their SCT Inst service-supporting technical partner(s) to make a smooth change-over of their relevant SCT Inst systems, infrastructures and applications from 2009 version to the 2019 version of the ISO 20022 standard on 19 November 2023.

The updated version contains the following changes:

• The entry-into-force time of the 2023 SCT rulebook will now be 19 November 2023 03:30 CET.
• There will now be a SEPA-wide 30 minutes downtime period for the SCT Inst scheme from 03:00 CET up to 03:30 CET. During this downtime period, no single SCT Inst instruction, transaction, r-transaction, transaction investigation and any response message related to them will be possible across SEPA.

In addition, the EPC has also published a version 2.0 of the guidance documents on the migration to the 2019 version of the ISO 20022-based XML messaging standard. This version now outlines the new entry-into-force time of the 2023 SCT Inst rulebook, the related preceding SEPA-wide downtime period and the explicit guidance to all SCT Inst scheme participants to duly inform, and well in advance, their customers about the SEPA-wide downtime.