During the first quarter of 2012, a new Balance and Transaction Reporting Standard from SWIFT and X9 is scheduled for introduction, according to X9, the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) accredited standards developer for national financial services standards. The standard, which currently goes by its acronym, BTRS, “will streamline communications between banks and their corporate customers, thus eliminating processing errors, reducing risk and automating cash management functions,” according to X9.
The new standard, which eventually will become ANS X9.121, should deliver. Ten principles guided the development of BTRS, the AFP presentation states. Among them: establishing a simple process to request new codes; putting codes and descriptions into global terms; and making the new codes as backward-compatible as possible.
As a result, the new BTRS incorporates best practices and code sets from both BAI and the IS0 20022 CAMT (cash management) reporting, according to X9. It also accounts for changes in the types of transactions used, and can accommodate non-Latin characters – particularly important as companies do more business in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
BTRS replaces BAI Version 2, which many organizations relied on to receive information about the cash management and treasury services provided by their banks and other vendors.
BAI 1, released in 1980, and BAI 2, released in 1987, were specifications nbajerseys's Blog, rather than formal standards, X9 notes. As a result, both left considerable room for interpretation. What’s more, discrepancies between the two versions, which BTRS will eliminate, prompted confusion.
An overwhelming majority (84%) of corporate practitioners responding to the AFP survey preferred the format and implementation guide standardized across all banks, according to AFP. In addition, 44% of respondents wanted the tags and XML descriptions standardized so that the information could be more easily read by both machines and people.
Finally, the new BTRS should have little risk of becoming outdated. According to X9, the code will be part of X9’s program of continuous maintenance, which is accredited by ANSI. In addition, X9 will provide an online facility that allows any BTRS user to nominate new status, summary or detail codes for consideration in a future release.
A presentation, based on an April 2010 survey to AFP members, highlighted some of the shortcomings of the previous BAI2 standard. Among them: too many codes overall, as well as too many unused and duplicate codes; the overuse of miscellaneous codes; and inconsistent coding by banks for adjustments. In fact, the survey concluded that the payments industry had evolved to the point that BAI2 no longer was effective. Instead, its continued evolution led to customization by banks. The resulting disparities made it difficult to automate data importation to other systems – which was the central purpose of the standard in the first place.
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