Italy Fines Agos Ducato €800,000 for Discriminating Against Non-Italian SEPA IBANs

Key Takeaways

• IBAN Discrimination Confirmed: Italy’s competition authority found that Agos Ducato unlawfully refused or restricted direct debit repayments from non-Italian SEPA IBANs, violating EU payment rules.
• Long-Running Conduct: The discriminatory practices spanned nearly a decade, from February 2014 through early 2023, covering both outright refusals and more burdensome manual procedures.
• Procedures Matter, Not Just Policy: Regulators said that even where foreign IBANs were theoretically accepted, the extra steps imposed made them materially harder to use in practice.
• Prior Case Did Not Bar Enforcement: Although an earlier decision was annulled on procedural grounds, the Authority reopened the case, citing EU case law supporting renewed enforcement.
• System Fixed, Fine Still Applies: Agos updated its systems in 2023 to treat Italian and non-Italian IBANs equally, but the Authority said remediation did not erase years of non-compliance.

Deep Dive

The Italian Competition Authority has said it fined Agos Ducato €800,000 after concluding the company spent years refusing direct debit repayments from non-Italian SEPA IBANs or steering customers into a more burdensome process than the one used for Italian accounts. The conduct, the Authority said, ran from February 2014 through the first quarter of 2023, cutting against the EU’s basic promise that paying in euros across SEPA should feel the same whether the account sits in Milan or Munich.

At the heart of the decision is Article 9 of Regulation (EU) No. 260/2012, the rule that tells “payment recipients” they can’t specify where in SEPA a payer’s account must be located, so long as the account is reachable. Regulators framed IBAN discrimination as more than an annoyance. It is a barrier to the single market because it discourages cross-border financial services and undermines the whole idea that consumers should be able to rely on one euro account across the SEPA area.

The Authority’s file paints a timeline that will sound familiar to anyone who has watched “policy” turn into “practice” inside a large organisation. It said that until November 2019, requests to set up direct debits from SEPA accounts outside Italy were handled case by case, without an automated process, and that in some instances customers were simply told they couldn’t use an IBAN that didn’t start with “IT.” Then, between November 2019 and early 2023, Agos introduced a dedicated process for non-Italian IBANs that relied on manual steps, including sending customers a SEPA Direct Debit form, collecting it back, and routing it internally for approval through treasury.

Agos argued that the SEPA rule doesn’t dictate a single method for accepting payments and that different procedures can be used. But the Authority drew a harder line on the practical outcome. It said the company’s approach didn’t just look different on paper, it made the non-Italian route meaningfully harder to complete, and the results reflected that. The decision notes that, by Agos’s own account, only a minority of requests during part of that period were successfully completed, with many customers dropping out along the way.

By the first quarter of 2023, the picture changed. The Authority said Agos updated its platform so customers could enter non-Italian SEPA IBANs through the same online interface used for Italian accounts, without a separate workflow. After that shift, the Authority said the evidence in the record supported an absence of further refusal cases or failed attempts tied to foreign IBANs, which mattered for defining how long the infringement lasted, but not for deciding whether it happened.

The enforcement story also has a legal twist. This was not the first time the Authority went after Agos over IBAN discrimination. An earlier decision was overturned by the regional administrative court in Lazio on procedural timing grounds. In the new case, the Authority pointed to evolving EU case law, including a January 2025 Court of Justice decision referenced in the record, to argue that national interpretations that effectively block renewed enforcement can conflict with EU law’s principle of effectiveness. In other words, the watchdog’s view was that a procedural annulment shouldn’t permanently immunise the underlying conduct from sanction where the merits were never adjudicated.

When it came time to set the penalty, the Authority cited the usual pillars: gravity and duration, plus the company’s economic profile. The decision references Agos’s 2024 consolidated figures, including revenue of about €1.738 billion and a reported annual profit of over €189 million, as context for the fine amount. The sanction ultimately landed at €800,000, within the administrative range available under Italy’s consumer code framework as applied to SEPA enforcement.

For compliance teams, the lesson isn’t complicated, but it is easy to miss in the weeds of payment operations. SEPA’s non-discrimination rule is not satisfied by a polite “we can do that, but…” process that quietly makes cross-border accounts harder to use in practice. Regulators are looking at the lived experience, not the policy statement.

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