BTRS

The Balance Transaction Reporting Standard (BTRS) is the next generation of cash management reporting roughly equivalent to BAI3.

BAI2 codes are domestic U.S. identifiers, however many corporations have implemented the codes for their global reporting requirements. ASC X9 has international access and can promote national standards internationally to become “ISO” standards. In the bank to corporate space, banks send many different file formats and messages to corporates: SWIFT MT 940/941/942, ISO 20022 CAMT 052/053/054 and/or BAI2 files/proprietary formats over FileAct and bank proprietary channels.

The ASC X9 Industry group introduced a new standard (BTRS) incorporating best practices and code sets from both BAI and the IS0 20022 CAMT (cash management) reporting. The standard underwent a formal voting and review process by X9 and ANSI to be published as an American National Standard (ANS) and is now an official U.S. standard for cash management reporting. A copy of the BTRS standard is available for purchase.

According to the ASC X9, some of the improvements of the BTRS are:

  • The elimination of codes that were no longer used or were creating interpretation differences which led to misalignment of usage.
  • The addition of new codes to allow for the new payment usage created by SEPA in Europe.
  • The incorporation of Unicode UTF-8 which allows for the use of non-Latin characters commonly referred to as “double byte”. This feature will allow for local language reporting of Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European characters. Such reporting assumes that the sender and receiver, as well as the processing systems, can accommodate these additional character sets.
  • The mapping and inter-operability of codes with the ISO 20022 – see http://www.iso20022.org and SWIFT MT code lists. Now, regardless of how the information is received, it can be converted as a standardized BTRS code.
  • BTRS accommodates global standards such as ISO 4217 (currency codes).
  • Redefinition of the technical content to the “Language of the Standard” to improve clarity of definitions of the codes and usage of the codes.
  • Use of multi-currency. The standard is no longer restricted to USD. The use of a currency code is now mandatory. This is a reflection of our global marketplace.
  • Mandatory account balance fields that define collected funds and float funds availability.
  • The incorporation of a structure for the mapping of the new Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) CTP (Customer Transfer Plus) and the CHIPS message for the 9,000 characters of additional remittance information.
  • The addition of a new a new detail record to accommodate bulk lock box and ACH transactions (the 89 Batch Detail record).
  • The addition of a new invoice detail record that will be attached to the 89 record and provide details of batch payments in the 90 Record (Invoice detail).

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