TWIST BSB was published in 2006 to address the global treasurer’s requirements for a standard, digital format for bank bills. Published by the TWIST standards group, the standards have been:

• E mbedded in a number of bank and

corporate billing applications

• D eployed by a number of banks globally

• U sed by a number of corporate globally

Some years of use have identified a few new requirements and a few errors to be corrected.

So a version 2 was warranted. “How to address?” was the question.

ISO 20022 is a family of international financial services messaging standards. It addresses payment initiation (including CGI), account reporting, various administrative messaging including Exceptions and Investigation (E and I), electronic bank account management (eBAM) and X9’s Balance and Transaction Reporting Standard (BTRS),

which replaces the BAI standard, it also lends itself to electronic messaging. With such a subject coverage, it is a likely place to find an electronic billing standard. The banks proposed to SWIFT and TWIST that BSB be updated and published under ISO. And SWIFT and TWIST agreed to be the submitting partners! The ISO 20022 process was followed to publish an ISO 20022 standard:

• A Business Justification was drafted presented and

accepted.

• A team was formed to draft the new message. SWIFT drafted a new version of the schema.

• Team members contributed optional documented helpful to implementer including;

A message usage guide A sample file A cross reference guide between version 1 and version 2 of the standard The ISO 20022 BSB schema and message definition reportis now available free of charge at the ISO 20022.org website.

The additional documentation (sample file, cross reference guide and message usage guide) are in the final stages of development and will be published shortly.