EU payment service providers must keep and report records of cross-border payments from 1 January 2024

What changed in detail

Council Directive (EU) 2020/284 of 18 February 2020, published in OJ L 62 on 2 March 2020, amends the VAT Directive (2006/112/EC) by inserting Articles 243a to 243d. Under its Article 2, Member States had to transpose it by 31 December 2023 and apply it from 1 January 2024.

• Who. Payment service providers must keep records of payees and payments for each calendar quarter, but only for cross-border payments: the payer is in a Member State and the payee is in another Member State or outside the EU (Article 243b(1)).
• Trigger. The duty applies where a provider handles more than 25 cross-border payments to the same payee in a calendar quarter, counted per Member State and per payee identifier (Article 243b(2)). The payer’s provider is relieved where the payee’s provider is in a Member State.
• Location. Payer and payee are located by IBAN or another unambiguous identifier, failing which by the provider’s BIC (Article 243c).
• Content. The records carry the payee’s name, any VAT or tax number, IBAN or other identifier, address if available, and each payment’s or refund’s date, amount, currency and Member State of origin (Article 243d).
• Retention. Records are kept electronically for three calendar years from the end of the year of payment and made available to the home Member State under Article 24b of Regulation (EU) No 904/2010 (Article 243b(4)).

What it means

This is the obligation side of CESOP and has applied since 2024; nothing later has replaced it. Providers report quarterly to their home tax authority, which forwards the data to the central system created by Regulation (EU) 2020/283, in the XML format set by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2022/1504. The 25-payment threshold is per provider and per payee, so a seller using several acquirers can be reported by each one that crosses it.