Introduction to Beneficiary Account Bank Switching Service

The Bank Switching Service (BSS) is a Dutch service for customers to switch payment accounts seamlessly from one bank to another without disruptions. This is in line with the obligations under the Payment Account Directive (PAD). The Bank Switching Service ensures continuity of payments for a customer within a prescribed switching period of 13 months.

Outward payments are directly addressed to the new beneficiary account if the account switch information is already available. Inward payments that are addressed to an already switched account are forwarded to the new account. The same applies for direct debit collections.

The ACSWIT.SWITCH.DIRECTORY application provided by Regulatory Compliance will be used if an active switch is available for the beneficiary IBAN.

This module enables banks to use the Bank Switching Service for customers to make it easier to switch to a new bank. Banks will be able to reroute the payments messages and generate the rerouted payments messages (PACS) with the switch account details in the specific tag.

Bank Switching Service

In order to provide the Bank Switching Service (BSS) there is an account switch directory which is published by the Dutch Payment Association and a copy of the directory is maintained by each participant of the switching service locally. equensWorldline (EWL) will provide the directory in an OVST file and Temenos Transact will map the same in the ACSWIT.SWITCH.DIRECTORY application.

If the bank is taking the OVST file from EWL containing all the bank switches, then this application in Temenos Transact will be updated by the bank’s interface system.

The OVST file is published on a regular basis and this data will be mapped to the ACSWIT.SWITCH.DIRECTORY application. Whenever a customer switches from Bank A to Bank B, the details from the OVST file will be recorded in the ACSWIT.SWITCH.DIRECTORY application. The OVST file contains the following details: Original Bank IBAN, Original Bank BIC, New Bank IBAN, New Bank BIC, Status of the Instruction, Effective Start Date Instruction and Expiration Date.

Credit transfers and direct debit collections as well as their returns and rejections are in scope for rerouting.

When initiating a payment or collection, the initiating bank will check if the beneficiary or the debtor IBAN is part of the ACSWIT.SWITCH.DIRECTORY application and, if so, will reroute the payment to the new bank. The result is that all payment and collection flows will go to the new bank account and the old account will not be used anymore. The rerouted payments can be identified as such by the receiving bank based on some specific processing logic.

The BSS service is available to the customer for only 13 months. If after 13 months, there are some payments or credits received in the old account of the customer, then the bank won’t be responsible for automatically rerouting these payments to the new account of the customer.

The following items have been introduced as part of this functionality:

• The PAYMENT.ORDER,NN.SEPA.INPUT version allows banks to initiate the SEPA credit transfer for EWL clearing.
• The PAYMENT.ORDER,NN.INSTPAY version allows banks to initiate the SEPA credit transfer instant payments.
• The ACSWIT.SWITCH.DIRECTORY application is used to store the switch instructions of all banks extracted from the EWL file.

Click here to understand the terms and abbreviations used in this module.