Business Remittance Information

Remittance information provides details to explain the purpose of the payment, such as invoice details. This information makes it easier for beneficiaries to process incoming payments.

The Federal Reserve Banks (FRBs) and The Clearing House Payments Company (TCH) are considering enhancements to the Fedwire Funds Service and Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) to include a standard set of structured remittance data elements. The addition of these data elements will address requests from corporations to have more information in the wire transfer message to explain the underlying purpose of the payment and to facilitate straight through processing. The new message would carry 9000 characters for remittance information data, which could support approximately 25 to 30 invoices per wire transfer message.

The message containing these new data elements will be passed between banks and either the FRBs or TCH in an agreed upon tag based format that is translatable to or from a variety of popular formats used by corporations to communicate with their banks today including the STP 820 electronic data interchange (EDI) format, the globally compatible ISO 20022 extensible markup language (XML) format, and/or proprietary / human readable formats. Regardless of which of these formats a corporation elects to use to send or receive the message, data elements in this solution have been selected so that banks will be able translate these messages on either side of the transaction for further processing without any material loss of data.

The data element categories to be included in this initiative are:

Category Name Description
Remittance Originator The name, address and account number of the remittance originator.
Remittance Beneficiary The name, address and identification number of the remittance beneficiary.
Primary Remittance Document Information The type and identification number of the document being paid (i.e., an invoice or other specified document).
Date of Remittance Document The date of the invoice (or other document).
Gross Amount of Remittance Document The gross amount of the invoice (or other document).
Actual Amount Paid The actual amount being paid for the invoice (or other document).
Amount of Negotiated Discount The amount of any negotiated discount deducted from the gross amount of the invoice (or other document).
Adjustment Information The amount and reason for any additional adjustment deducted from the gross amount of the document being paid. Additional free text to describe the adjustment.
Secondary Remittance Document Information An additional document reference number to describe the remittance payment. When using an invoice for the primary remittance identification information, one might also choose to include a related purchase order number or other specified document number in this field.
Remittance Free Text Free text for additional information about the remittance payment.

For more information regarding preferences of corporations for remittance information with business-to-business wire payments, please see the joint research published by the FRBs and TCH (PDF).

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