Blog I – Accelerator for Payment Formats

Last Review: 26^th July 2019

Remarks: This blog will be updated accordingly

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Managing Payment Media can be time consuming and requires extensive testing not only for the media generation, but also integration to the banks.

While in the On Premise world we could easily add custom code using user exits to quickly create content, in S/4HANA Cloud this option is greatly reduced focused largely on using the SSCUI “Map Payment Format Data” to map the outgoing files according to the requirement of the bank.

If you are now just starting your S/4HC journey and you consider one or more payment formats as part of the project scope, check the content below.

Pre-delivered Formats

SAP delivers a lot of standard formats that follow specific rules depending on the country. These formats can be used as an accelerator in order to meet the specific requirements of the bank. So, let’s look at two examples:

• CGI: DMEE XML Format as per ISO20022 – these formats follow an ISO standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions. Each country has its own specification but SAP currently delivers a single version across countries.

• Country/Region Specific Payment Formats – besides the ISO mentioned in the aforementioned example, some countries have other very specific requirements – these include for example:

a. Febraban format for Brazil

b. BACS format for the United Kingdom

c. ACH for US

SAP also delivers pre-build formats for other countries. You can find information on the delivered formats here .

What if the format delivered by SAP is not enough?

Although banks will follow the general standards outlined for a specific format, sometimes customers may need to change the mapping rules of the format in order to align to the bank specific requirements. Examples of such changes include:

• concatenation of fields to support reconciliation
• setting of fields from optional to mandatory
• replacing the standard mapping for customer specific mapping

It’s not possible to edit the format mapping delivered by SAP, instead you may copy the required format and adjust it in accordance to your needs.

In the following section, you may find some of the steps involved in adapting payment formats to meet specific project requirements.

In the SSCUI Map Payment Format Data (100558), it is possible to import, add new nodes, edit existing attributes to ensure the financial institution can process your payment.

Note that, currently, mapping Payment Format Data has very limited extensibility options. Despite that, it is possible to add custom fields. For more details, read the following blog

Can I have tested mapping formats and use them?

In order to accelerate implementation, you may find some mapping formats attached that have already been tested with banks in certain countries.

As a disclaimer: please note that these formats are provided as an accelerator only and may still need to be reviewed and aligned to the specific bank/country requirements.

The list below shows the formats available with the respective bank. Please note that you should always test the formats with your bank.

To use the available mapping formats, it is necessary to create a new Payment Medium format and use the import function.