Harry WellsFollowing the successful migration of the CHAPS system to the ISO 20022 payments messaging standard in June 2023, BoE has published a policy statement providing further clarity on the mandatory requirements for ISO 20022 enhanced data for CHAPS taking effect in 2025 and 2026. These are:
- Purpose Codes and Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs):
- From 1 May 2025, BoE will mandate the:
- use of Purpose Codes for CHAPS payments between financial institutions, and for property transactions; and
- the inclusion of LEIs for CHAPS payments between financial institutions. BoE intends to widen the LEI requirement to all CHAPS payments over time.
- From 1 May 2025, BoE will mandate the:
- Structured remittance:
- From November 2025, BoE will mandate that where remittance information is included in a pacs.008 for CHAPS payments, it must be structured. This will initially be mandated through the CHAPS rulebook.
- Structured addresses:
- Where address is included, BoE encourages fully structured addresses. However, from November 2025, BoE will enable ‘hybrid’ addresses;
- From November 2026, CHAPS payments containing fully unstructured addresses will be rejected by the CHAPS validation library, in line with international standards.
BoE is also consulting on expanding the mandatory requirements from November 2027 by:
- mandating the use of Purpose Codes for all CHAPS payments; and
- including all initiation channels within the scope of enhanced data requirements.
The consultation closes on 28 June 2024.