Single Euro Payments Area  The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a payment-integration initiative of the European Union for simplification of bank transfers denominated in euro. , there were 36 members in SEPA, consisting of the 27 member states of the European Union, the four member states of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), and the United Kingdom. Some countries participate in the technical schemes: Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City. The aim of SEPA is to improve the efficiency of cross-border payments and turn the previously fragmented national markets for euro payments into a single domestic one. SEPA enables customers to make cashless euro payments to any account located anywhere in the area, using a single bank account and a single set of payment instruments. People who have a bank account in a eurozone country can use it to receive salaries and make payments all over the eurozone, for example when they take a job in a new country. The project includes the development of common financial instruments, standards, procedures, and infrastructure to enable economies of scale. This should, in turn, reduce the overall cost to the European economy of moving capital around the region (estimated as 2-3% of total GDP). SEPA does not cover payments in currencies other than the euro. This means that domestic payments in SEPA countries not using the euro will continue to use local schemes, but cross border payments will to a high degree use SEPA and euro against eurozone countries. The Nordic countries which (except Finland) do not plan to adopt the euro, have in 2017-2019 started initiatives to get simpler, faster and cheaper cross-border payments between each other. There were two milestones in the establishment of SEPA:   For direct debits, the first milestone was missed due to a delay in the implementation of enabling legislation (the Payment Services Directive or PSD) in the European Parliament. Direct debits became available in November 2009, which put time pressure on the second milestone. The European Commission has established the legal foundation through the PSD. The commercial and technical frameworks for payment instruments were developed by the European Payments Council (EPC), made up of European banks. The EPC is committed to delivering three pan-European payment instruments:   To provide end-to-end straight-through processing (STP) for SEPA-clearing, the EPC committed to delivering technical validation subsets of ISO 20022. Whereas bank-to-bank messages (pacs) are mandatory for use, customer-to-bank payment initialization (PAIN) message types are not; however, they are strongly recommended.