Customers who make SEPA payments: mandatory use of supported characters for IBAN field

SEPA payments: mandatory use of supported characters for IBAN field

Last updated: 3 May 2017

Effective 10 June 2017, SEPA instructions submitted via HSBCnet’s File Upload and on-screen services must only contain alphanumeric characters for the IBAN field.

As part of this requirement, from 10 June, if you attempt to submit a SEPA payment containing unsupported characters in the IBAN field, an error message will be displayed and you will need to amend the instruction to proceed. Instruction Level Authorisation (ILA) SEPA payment files, submitted via File Upload, that contain unsupported characters will not be available for authorisation. These files will be sent back in Pending Repair status (via the Payment Summary service) to be amended.

Recommended action before 10 June:
To prevent possible payment delays, we recommend that you review your SEPA payment templates and files for invalid characters in the IBAN field and update them, if required.

Please note, IBAN numbers that are copied and pasted into your payment files and on-screen payment instructions may contain invisible characters, which could cause payments to fail. As such, we recommend that you manually enter the IBAN field in your SEPA payments.

SEPA payment supported characters for IBAN field effective 10 June 2017
Characters	Description
“a” – “z”	26 lowercase characters of the Latin alphabet
“A” – “Z”	26 uppercase (capital) characters of the Latin alphabet
“0” – “9”	10 numeric characters

For questions about this SEPA payment update, please contact your local HSBCnet Support Centre.