Customer to Bank Space: pain.001, pain.002 and the Exchange Periods

In customer to bank space, Loire Components creates a pain.001.001.09 file and sends it to Meridian Bank Paris through its host to host channel. The file carries one payment information block for the EUR 48,250 payment, naming Loire Components as debtor, Rhine Metals as creditor, the creditor IBAN, the requested execution date of Tuesday 10 November 2026, the charge bearer SLEV for shared charges, and the remittance information naming invoice INV-2026-0873. The group header carries the message identification, the creation date and time, one transaction, and a control sum of EUR 48,250. If the control sum were wrong, Meridian Bank Paris could reject the whole file before any payment is processed. Meridian Bank Paris replies with a pain.002.001.10 Customer Payment Status Report, and that reply closes the loop for the customer. The first pain.002 arrives shortly after the file is received, and it reports whether the instruction was accepted for processing or rejected at validation. A rejection carries a reason code, for example AC01 for a wrong account number or AM09 for a wrong amount, so the treasury team at Loire Components can correct the error and resend the same day. A second pain.002 may follow after execution, confirming that the payment has been sent into clearing. Without these reports, the customer would have no reliable way to know whether EUR 48,250 had left its account. Exchange periods are the scheduled windows in which banks exchange interbank messages through the clearing system, and they decide the rhythm of a SEPA Credit Transfer. A bank collects the payments its customers instructed, validates them, and releases them into the next exchange period. The SCT scheme sets a maximum execution time of one business day, so a payment instructed on Monday must reach the beneficiary bank by Tuesday at the latest. In practice, most SEPA payments settle on the same day when they are sent before the bank cut-off, because several exchange periods run during the business day and the clearing system processes each batch quickly. Cut-off times are the practical consequence of exchange periods, and a business analyst must make them visible in any requirement. Meridian Bank Paris sets a customer cut-off of three in the afternoon Central European Time for same day SCT execution. Loire Components sends its pain.001 file at half past ten in the morning on Monday 9 November, well before the cut-off, so the payment enters the Monday exchange periods and Harbour Bank Frankfurt credits Rhine Metals on Tuesday 10 November at the latest. If the file had arrived at a quarter to five in the afternoon, after the cut-off, the payment would have waited for the next business day exchange periods, and Rhine Metals would have received the funds a day later. The value date, the date on which the funds become available, follows the same timetable. Worked example with numbers: Loire Components sends its pain.001.001.09 file at 14:30 Central European Time, half an hour before the Meridian Bank customer cut-off of 15:00, and the file carries one payment of EUR 48,250 with the debtor, creditor, amount, currency and end to end identification. Meridian Bank validates the file, accepts it, and replies with a pain.002.001.10 reporting ACCP, accepted for processing, within minutes. The payment is then released into the next exchange period, and if Loire Components had sent the file at 15:30, after the cut-off, the payment would have waited until the next business day, and the supplier would have been credited a day later, which matters when the invoice is due on the same day. Failure and recovery: customer to bank space fails when the pain.001 file is malformed, when a field is missing, or when the file arrives after the cut-off. If the file carries a payment with a missing creditor IBAN, Meridian Bank rejects the whole file or the single payment, depending on its validation rule, and replies with a pain.002 carrying RJCT and the reason code. The recovery is a corrected file, but the payment has lost its exchange period, and the value date must be moved. If the file arrives after the cut-off, there is no failure to fix, only a delay to explain, and the customer must be told the new credit date before the payment is released, because a customer who expects same day credit and gets next day credit will call to ask where the money is. For a business analyst, product owner or subject matter expert, the customer to bank requirement must state the file format, the validation rules, the cut-off time and the status reports, and must name the messages, pain.001 in and pain.002 back. The requirement must also state the exchange periods, because they decide the rhythm of the payment, and must state what happens when a file arrives after the cut-off, because that is the most common customer complaint. The test pack must include a file with a missing field, a file with a wrong IBAN, and a file that arrives after the cut-off, because each case exercises a different rule. Source: EPC SCT Rulebook 2025 version 1.1; last reviewed 7 November 2026.