SEPA Credit Transfer UK
SEPA Credit Transfer UK
Our SEPA Credit Transfer UK (SCT UK) service lets you exchange euro payments with any SEPA participant bank via the SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) scheme. To get started with SCT UK, you'll need a euro account under a ClearBank UK BIC. This will be set up for you as part of your onboarding process.
If you're interested in using this new service, please contact your Client Director.
Availability and hours
SCT UK is available Monday to Friday from 07:00 to 14:30 UK time, and is subject to scheme holidays.
The scheme holidays applicable to SCT UK are listed below:
- New Year's Day
- Good Friday
- Easter Monday
- Labour Day
- Christmas Day
- Boxing Day / Christmas Holiday
Exact dates can be found on the ECB's website.
Bulk payments
SCT UK supports bulk payments, which can be useful for making many simultaneous payments. Each outbound payment request can include up to three debtor accounts, each of which can pay up to 2 different creditor accounts. It is therefore possible to request up to 6 payments at once.
Each payment request contains a nested structure of debtor accounts and their associated payments and creditor details. The outer array, PaymentInformation, contains entries for each debtor account. Within each debtor entry, the CreditTransferTransactionInformation array lists up to 2 individual payments to creditor accounts.
When you send several payments at once in bulk, each payment is processed individually. This means if one payment fails, the remainder of the batch will be unaffected. You'll receive either a Cross-Border Outbound Payment Failed, or a Cross-Border Outbound Payment Completed and a Customer Accounts Transaction Completed webhook for each payment in the batch, so you can keep track of their status.
Validation
When requesting a SEPA CT payment from our POST /payments/cross-border/v2/payments endpoint, certain validation requirements must be fulfilled:
- Text fields cannot have leading or trailing whitespace
- The creditor agent bank must be on the SCT Reachable Payment Service Provider (PSP) list*
* - For a current list of reachable PSPs, refer to the spreadsheet available at the blue URL at the bottom of the European Banking Authority's STEP2 SCT Participants page.
Outbound payments
Example outbound payment request
You can use the below example request payload to test the POST /payments/cross-border/v2/payments endpoint.
Take care to update the RequestedExecutionDate field to today's date, and to use a different UETR if using this example more than once.
{"messageIdentification": "MSGID-25OCT23-TEST03","paymentInformation": [{"paymentInformationIdentification": "PYMTID-25OCT23-DEBT-03","requestedExecutionDate": "2025-10-23","debtor": {"name": "John Smith","postalAddress": {"streetName": "High Street","buildingNumber": "100","postCode": "DN40 2AB","townName": "Immingham","countrySubdivision": "Lincolnshire","country": "GB"},"organisationIdentification": {"anyBic": "PAEEGB22"}},"debtorAccount": {"iban": "GB96CLRB04056700273872"},"creditTransferTransactionInformation": [{"paymentIdentification": {"instructionIdentification": "INSTID-25OCT23-03A","endToEndIdentification": "E2E-25OCT23-03A","uetr": "107367a1-99c3-411e-abd1-fcbbb74a8b01"},"paymentTypeInformation": {"serviceLevelCode": "SEPA"},"instructedAmount": {"amount": 1.03,"currency": "EUR"},"creditorAgent": {"bicfi": "BCOEESM0"},"creditor": {"name": "Maria Garcia","postalAddress": {"streetName": "Calle de Alcala","buildingNumber": "45","postCode": "28014","townName": "Madrid","countrySubdivision": "Community of Madrid","country": "ES"},"privateIdentification": {"birthDate": "1987-11-10","cityOfBirth": "Madrid","countryOfBirth": "ES"}},"creditorAccount": {"iban": "ES9121000418450200051332"},"remittanceInformation": {"unstructured": ["RemittanceInformation Unstructured 2025OCT23C"]}}]}]}
Inbound payments
When you receive an SCT payment, you'll be notified via webhook. To receive webhooks, you'll need to subscribe to them first using the ClearBank Portal.
Our SCT UK service has two dedicated inbound payment webhooks:
Payments.CrossBorder.InboundPaymentCompleted- Cross-border Inbound Payment Completed webhook - This webhook contains detailed ISO 20022 compliant payment information of any inbound SCT payments.CustomerAccounts.TransactionCompleted- Customer Account Transaction Completed webhook - This webhook contains the minimum information necessary to reconcile a payment.
Note: if you are subscribed to our inbound Multi-Currency Payments service webhooks,
Payments.Mccy.TransactionCreatedandPayments.Mccy.TransactionSettled, these will also notify you of any inbound SCT payments. All of these webhooks'TransactionIdfield will have the same UUID whenever they refer to the same payment, so you can use this field in your idempotency logic to prevent double counting of inbound SCT payments.