Introduction to Clearings

This guide briefly explains about identifying and matching the original Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (BACS) direct credit payment when it is returned, based on defined matching parameters.

The PPBACS module interfaces Temenos payments to the UK BACS payment system for direct credits and direct debits.

Financial Institutions will either directly or indirectly interface to the BACS Clearing system.

The data exchange between the institutions and the BACS Clearing happens files based. The data format of the payment files is text based and called “Standard 18”.

In contrary to modern clearing formats, Standard 18 does not contain an end-to-end identifier that allows to identify a payment by a unique Id.

In case of payment returns and rejections to, the original payment has to be identified by a number of non-unique attributes like origination account number, payment reference and amount.

Temenos payments considers unmatched returns and rejections as new payments. While direct credit returns are credited to the originator account, Direct Debit rejections are moved to the repair queue for investigation and manual processing.

Temenos payments provides a payment match API that is invoked for any payment return or rejection. This allows the institution to implement appropriate matching routines to link the return or retention to the original payment and automate the processing.

This module provides a standard matching functionality for BACS direct credit returns and BACS direct debit rejections. This Model Bank implementation of the Temenos payments matching API is supposed to accomplish the payment matching for most business cases. However, a Temenos client can still implement its individual matching method if required.