Recital 17

The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) has facilitated the creation of Union wide -‘payment factories’ and ‘collection factories’, allowing for the centralisation of payment transactions of the same group. In that respect payment transactions between a parent undertaking and its subsidiary or between subsidiaries of the same parent undertaking provided by a payment service provider belonging to the same group should be excluded from the scope of this Directive. The collection of payment orders on behalf of a group by a parent undertaking or its subsidiary for onward transmission to a payment service provider should not be considered to be a payment service for the purposes of this Directive.