Plain-English definitions of the terms that appear across this site and in your bank's channel documentation. Written for treasurers and operations teams first, engineers second.
Messages#
pain.001 — Customer Credit Transfer Initiation. The XML message a customer sends its bank to order one or more credit transfers. The "pain" family is payment initiation; .001 is the message number; the trailing version (.001.09) pins the schema.
pain.002 — Customer Payment Status Report. The bank's answer to your pain.001 or pain.008: accepted, partially accepted, or rejected, with ISO reason codes per transaction.
pain.008 — Customer Direct Debit Initiation. The collection-side twin of pain.001: you pull funds owed to you under a mandate rather than pushing funds out.
pacs.008 / pacs.009. The interbank settlement messages your instruction becomes once the bank accepts it. Corporates never author these; banks exchange them.
camt.052 / camt.053 / camt.054. Account reporting: intraday report, end-of-day statement, and debit/credit notification respectively. camt.053 is what reconciliation teams consume each morning.
MT101. The legacy SWIFT "Request for Transfer" text message that pain.001 replaces. The interbank MT101 relay is decommissioned on 14 November 2026 in favour of pain.001.001.09; corporate-to-bank MT101 persists only at each bank's discretion.
Schemes and rulebooks#
SEPA SCT / SCT Inst. The euro credit-transfer schemes (standard and instant) governed by the European Payments Council rulebooks. Instant transfers settle in seconds, around the clock.
SEPA SDD Core / B2B. The euro direct-debit schemes — Core for consumers (with refund rights), B2B for businesses (no refund right, stricter mandate checks).
CBPR+. Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus: the usage guidelines that profile ISO 20022 messages for SWIFT correspondent banking. When people say "the SWIFT ISO 20022 migration", they mean CBPR+.
HVPS+. The equivalent profiling for high-value payment systems (T2, CHAPS, Fedwire and peers).
CGI-MP. Common Global Implementation — Market Practice: the group harmonising how corporates use pain messages across banks, so one file format can serve many banking partners.
Verification of Payee (VoP). The EU-mandated name/IBAN match check applied to all SEPA credit transfers since 9 October 2025. Done by the PSP at execution time; clean creditor data determines whether it matches.
Identifiers and data#
IBAN. International Bank Account Number (ISO 13616), self-checking via a mod-97 checksum — which is why a single transposed digit is detectable before submission.
BIC / BICFI. The ISO 9362 Business Identifier Code of a financial institution. The XML element is pain.001.001.03 but
LEI. Legal Entity Identifier (ISO 17442) — the 20-character global company identifier. Over 3 million are active, and regulators increasingly mandate them in payments.
UETR. Unique End-to-end Transaction Reference — the UUID that lets a payment be traced across the correspondent chain (SWIFT gpi).
Structured / hybrid address. Postal addresses as discrete XML elements (street, town, postcode, country) versus free-text lines. From 14 November 2026, CBPR+ rejects fully unstructured addresses; hybrid — structured town and country plus up to two 70-character address lines — remains valid.
NbOfTxs / CtrlSum. The group-header control totals: transaction count and amount sum. Banks recompute them; if yours disagree, the file bounces. Pain001 always derives them from the validated records.
Charge bearer. Who pays the fees: DEBT (sender), CRED (receiver), SHAR (shared), SLEV (per scheme rules). Legacy MT OUR/BEN/SHA map to the first three.
Remittance information. The "what this payment is for" field — free text (140 characters) or structured references. The thing reconciliation teams wish everyone filled in properly.
Tooling terms used on this site#
XSD validation. Checking XML against the official ISO 20022 schema definition. Pain001 treats it as a hard gate before any file is written.
MCP — Model Context Protocol. The open standard through which AI assistants call external tools. pain001-mcp exposes 17 payment tools to any MCP client, locally over stdio.
LSP — Language Server Protocol. The editor-integration standard behind IDE diagnostics. pain001-lsp uses it to validate payment files as you type.
SBOM. Software Bill of Materials — a machine-readable inventory of every dependency in a release, generated in CycloneDX format for Pain001 core releases.
Something missing? Suggest a term — this glossary grows with the questions people actually ask.