Why Your Bank Formats Have an Expiry Date

Most finance teams think about their bank connection twice: when they set it up, and when it breaks. In between, the file formats that carry payments and statements keep changing underneath them, and every one of those formats has an expiry date.

Take Germany. Its banks had set November 2026 as the end of the line for a whole generation of SEPA payment formats and for DTAZV, the German format for international payments. Then, in September, the German Banking Industry Committee paused that retirement and said new end dates will follow. So if you were preparing for November, you have more time. If you weren’t, the deadline is still coming, just not on the date you were told.

This isn’t one bank’s quirk. It’s how the whole banking industry now works: formats are versioned, released on a yearly cycle and retired on a schedule. Keeping up is part of running payments, not a once-a-decade IT project.

The short version: the industry is moving everything to current versions of ISO 20022 and retiring the formats that came before. That covers three kinds of file.

The newer formats aren’t just a relabelling – they carry structured addresses, Legal Entity Identifiers, unique end-to-end references (UETRs) and richer remittance data. An old-format file either can’t carry that data or loses it along the way. For a primer on the message types, see our guide to ISO 20022 and PAIN messages.

Each format has two dates that matter. The first is when the industry standard ends, set by a scheme or banking body. The second is how long your own bank keeps accepting the format after that. The gap between the two is a grace period, not a guarantee, and it varies from bank to bank.

Some of these cut-offs have already passed. At least one major German bank stopped accepting SEPA files in version 2.9 and below in March 2026. Older statement formats are still accepted, but banks warn that they can lose information and recommend moving to camt version 08.

Every major bank and payment scheme is on the same path, and most were working to the same November 2026 date until the late-summer delays. Here’s where some of them stand.

In Ireland, AIB and Bank of Ireland already run SEPA payments on pain.001.001.09, according to Access COINS. Businesses still sending older files will face the same tightening of structured data rules as the rest of Europe.

The pattern is consistent. Schemes and industry bodies set the direction, banks set their own cut-off dates (sometimes earlier, sometimes with a grace period), and the dates move. The European Payments Council put it plainly when it announced its delay: the timeline has changed, but “the direction of travel remains unchanged.”

The same thing is happening in the US and Asia-Pacific. Outside Europe, banks and payment providers are mostly retiring payment systems and bank connections rather than the file formats businesses send, but finance teams feel the same effect.

Japan’s example is a reminder that providers can retire the connection, not just the format. The files were fine, but the provider switched off the line they travelled on, and banks such as Seven Bank had to move corporate customers onto new connections.

Australia’s story mirrors Germany’s. A date was set, members said it wasn’t achievable, and it was pulled. The direction hasn’t changed. In the US, some things are staying put for now: banks still offer BAI2 statements alongside camt.053, and we found no retirement date for BAI2.

Format changes rarely announce themselves inside a finance team. The first sign is usually a problem.

The recent delays make the last point more pressing. A paused deadline is easy to forget, and nobody yet knows how much notice the new one will come with.

Cashbook sits between your ERP and your banks. It creates outbound payment files and brings bank statements in for reconciliation. That makes bank formats our problem as much as yours.

Whatever tools you use, these steps will put you ahead of the next deadline.

This autumn’s delays from Swift, the EPC and the German banks bought everyone time, but nobody has reversed course. Banks are already rejecting older SEPA versions, the German standard has already dropped MT940, and every bank in this post is heading to the same ISO 20022 versions.The businesses that use the extra time well will barely notice the next cut-off.

Want to know where your bank formats stand? Talk to the Cashbook team and we’ll help you map your formats against your banks’ timelines.