The National Bank of Romania (NBR) Electronic Payment System (EPS) will contribute to the development of the Romanian economy as a whole and, particularly, of the banking sector by increasing the fluency of the payments as well as by reducing the settlement period and the processing costs. The EPS system will be fully compliant with the European Union requirements and standards regarding the payment systems. The aimed result of the Phare financed project is a state-of-the-art system based on a state of the art technology.

As a result of the cooperation in the banking sector, a key role in the implementation of the EPS will have TransFonD, a joint stock company having the NBR and the commercial banks as shareholders, who will ensure the technical management of the future interbank payment system. The National Bank of Romania (NBR) will further ensure the oversight of the payment system, according to the laws of Romania.

The EPS will supply a suite of payment applications (RTGS, ACH, Government Securities Registry, Debit Instrument Clearing and settlement i.e. Cheque Truncation Clearing and Settlement) to NBR/TransFonD. The SIA system consists of subsystem components with a single architecture using the latest technologies, specifically:

• Object-Oriented Programming development methods
• Compliance with the JavaTM Enterprise (J2EE) model
• Support of an Open System Architecture
• Hardware independence
• Operating system independence including Unix
• Supports all relational database products
• Integrated with the latest PKI security technology that is EU Directive compliant
• Meets very high standards for performance scalability and stability