SDD checkpoint
Mandates, pulled collections, and the refund rights that keep direct-debit money provisional — can you tell Core from B2B and a refund from a return?
QUESTIONS AS TEXT
Q1. What makes a direct debit fundamentally different from a credit transfer?
Answer: A: The creditor initiates the collection under a standing mandate; the debtor does not act per payment.
Push vs pull is the whole story: in SCT the debtor pushes each payment; in SDD the creditor pulls under a mandate signed once. Every protection in the scheme — pre-notification, refusal, the refund window — exists to balance that standing permission.
Q2. Put a first SDD Core collection in the order it actually happens.
Answer: 1. The debtor signs the mandate (Without a signed mandate there is no authority to collect at all — it must exist before anything else.) 2. The creditor pre-notifies the debtor of the upcoming collection (The scheme requires the debtor to know a collection is coming, so pre-notification precedes presentation.) 3. The creditor sends pain.008 to its own bank (The creditor starts the collection on the customer-to-bank leg by sending pain.008 to its own bank.) 4. The banks exchange the collection as pacs.003 via the CSM (The banks exchange the collection interbank as pacs.003 through the CSM, ahead of the due date.) 5. The debtor's account is debited on the due date (The debit lands on the due date itself — the end of the chain, and never before the debtor was told.)
The mandate must exist before anything else; the debtor must be told before the money moves; the collection is presented ahead of the due date and the debit lands on it. Everything is scheduled around the due date — that predictability is why creditors like the scheme.
Q3. What should the treasurer expect?
Answer: A: The consumer is too late for the no-questions refund (eight weeks have passed); the business has no refund right for an authorised B2B collection at all.
The windows are the lesson: authorised Core collections refund unconditionally for eight weeks; unauthorised ones (no valid mandate) for thirteen months; authorised B2B collections do not refund — the debtor bank's mandatory mandate check replaced that protection.
Q4. Under SDD Core, who checks the mandate before the debtor's account is debited?
Answer: A: Nobody in the chain — the debtor's bank debits on the data presented, and the refund right compensates.
Core designs a trade: frictionless collection (no per-collection mandate check anywhere in the chain) balanced by the strongest refund right in SEPA. B2B inverts it — mandatory debtor-bank verification, no refund for authorised collections.