[dfox]

There is slight problem with the fact that while it looks like pretty much country neutral system that is built on SEPA it in reality builds upon czech/slovak ABO system (Automated Banking Operations, which probably holds world record for government project with longest deadline overrun, as it was in development for almost exactly 20 years) and it's data fields for automatic identification of payments (X-VS, X-SS and X-KS in SPAYD IIRC). While SEPA has even more powerful mechanisms for this it seems that they are not much used, maybe exactly because they are too powerful.

One thing that fascinates me is contrast between european giro banking systems and ABO in particular (where account number is just an ID/address and has no security implications) and checking account based system used in US where everithing seems to be somewhat backwards from what would make sense.