SEPI

SEPI stands for Secure Exchange of Payment Information. It is the digital euro's answer to a problem every payment system has: how do you move payment details around without spraying sensitive data across everything they touch?

What it does#

SEPI is a process of substituting payer data, or payee and transaction data, with a surrogate value. That surrogate has a specific property worth stating carefully: in itself it does not provide information about the payment transaction. Looking at it tells you nothing.

But it is not a dead end. The surrogate allows the authorised PSP to retrieve the data elements it needs in order to instruct settlement.

So the surrogate is a claim ticket, not a container. It carries no data; it entitles the right party to fetch the data.

If you have worked with card tokenisation, this will feel familiar. A surrogate value is defined in the same spirit: a set of characters that represents and replaces sensitive information so the information can be processed safely.

Where you meet it#

SEPI is the service behind digital euro flows that involve a token standing in for the real details — notably QR-code and pay-by-link style interactions. Rulebook development work has covered SEPI alongside the alias look-up service, including QR-code and pay-by-link tokenisation.

The pattern in practice:

1. A payee generates a QR-token rather than exposing account and transaction data.
2. The payer's side presents that token.
3. The authorised PSP resolves the token to the underlying elements and instructs settlement.

Why it matters#

SEPI is one of the concrete mechanisms behind the digital euro's privacy posture. Pseudonymisation is not a slogan attached to the project; it is implemented by things like aliases and SEPI, which between them mean the data flowing through a payment reveals far less than the payment itself would suggest.