Accounts in Turkey: mandatory use of supported characters for domestic payments

Last updated: 19 November 2018

Effective 3 December 2018, domestic Turkey payment instructions created on HSBCnet must only contain SWIFT-supported and/or Turkish characters.

What payments are impacted?

You’ll need to include supported characters in your HSBCnet payment instructions for the following types of payments, where IBAN or BBAN is used:

Local and Foreign currency transfers within HSBC Turkey
Local currency transfers to third-party banks within Turkey

What do I need to do?

To prevent possible payment rejections, we recommend that you review your General/Restricted templates, Standing instructions, and Forward-dated payments before 3 December. If any of these instructions include invalid characters, you’ll need to cancel and re-create them using supported characters (shown in the table below).

After 3 December, HSBCnet will reject any impacted payments that include invalid characters.

Domestic Turkey payments: supported characters effective 3 December 2018
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
Ö,Ş,Ü,Ğ,Ç,İ	6 uppercase Turkish characters
ı,ö,ç,ü,ğ,ş	6 lowercase Turkish characters
/	Solidus (slash)
-	Hyphen
?	Question mark
:	Colon
( )	Parentheses
.	Full stop (period)
,	Comma
'	Apostrophe
+	Plus
You’re also allowed to include spaces in payment instructions on HSBCnet
Characters that will be rejected in HSBCnet:
Any non-Latin characters, other than Turkish (ie. Arabic, Chinese, Kyril, Japanese, etc.)

Note: for payments to beneficiary accounts outside Turkey, you’ll continue to only be allowed to use SWIFT-supported characters. If you attempt to include Turkish characters in cross-border payment instructions, you’ll receive an error message in HSBCnet.

Find out more

If you have any questions, please contact your local HSBCnet Support Centre.