Across the world, businesses and governments are working to modernize billing and invoicing processes to ensure transparency, operational efficiency, and plug revenue leakage. For large enterprises, particularly those with multi-country, multi-currency operations, traditional billing processes are proving to be inefficient bottlenecks. Disconnected systems, limited visibility, and inconsistent formats have made invoice reconciliation cumbersome and time-consuming. But the ISO 20022-based camt.086 financial messaging standard is changing that. Let’s find out how.

The Billing Bottleneck in Corporate Banking

Traditional paper-based invoices are being replaced with digital formats like PDF or even Excel. But these formats are far from being perfect.

• Complexity: A large multi-national organization would generate detailed and complicated billing statements in PDF and Excel formats that could run up to hundreds of pages. It would be impossible to effectively analyze these statements for any meaningful insights.
• Limited Information: PDF statements contain limited information to ensure readability. For example, they may not provide any information on relationship summaries, or customer groups, or currency-wise breakup of accounts. This kind of data is important for ensuring informed decision-making on strategy. 80 percent of banking customers said they lacked adequate visibility in their bank charges, while 60% were dissatisfied with the clarity of information provided.
• Lack of Standardization: Different banks follow different layouts and placements in their PDF statements. Corporate treasurers must run PDFs from different organizations through specialized software before they can extract the details they need. This leaves room for errors and extensive reconciliation efforts.
• Difficult Reconciliation Process: PDF statements lack essential details like integrated invoice references, tax computation details at the service level, and structured data. This makes it difficult to reconcile service charges against invoices, and the challenge is compounded with a high volume of services across entities.
• Account Analysis Statements: The widely used EDI 822 format offers limited support for international banking requirements like multi-currency handling and tax breakdowns. Banks must rely on additional PDFs to fill in the gaps for account analysis.

camt.086: The New Standard for Smart Billing

camt.086 is a standardized electronic bank statement format. It is defined by the ISO 20022 standard and provides a structured format for banks to report fees and charges to their customers. It is quickly becoming a global standard as it offers a unified, standardized machine-readable statement in XML format that most enterprise systems can work with. It ensures:

• Structured data delivery, which provides information on account hierarchies, legal entity grouping as well as relationship summaries.
• Complete visibility into essential information such as service charges, pricing models, applicable taxes, and relevant currency conversions.
• Easy cross-bank charge comparison with standardized service codes (AFP or ISO 20022 Bank Transaction Codes).
• Detailed taxation breakdowns that consider factors like region and tax type.
• Multi-currency support for accounting, pricing, tax, and settlement currencies.

With camt.086 multinational companies can improve reconciliation efficiency and audit readiness and are better prepared for informed and data-backed negotiations.

Beyond Statements: Real Strategic Value

camt.086 is more than just a reporting tool. It provides detailed, intelligent data in a structured and standardized format to improve operational efficiency and transparency and help organizations use the insights to build value-added services.

The camt.086 does this by essentially capturing the entire pricing and service lifecycle and explaining all charges. For example, it captures details like negotiated and contracted rates, tiered or unit-based consumption pricing, service adjustments and refunds, tax computation methods and rates, currency exchange rates used, and service-level identifiers and standard industry codes. With all this information easily accessible, companies can not only reconcile transactions more accurately, but also analyze, benchmark, and optimize their banking services.

It provides complete visibility into how each fee is calculated, which helps companies identify high-cost or infrequently used services. This information is invaluable for helping treasury and procurement teams effectively control costs. The camt.086 uses standardized service codes, which enables companies to compare costs and utilization of similar services across banks. They can then consolidate services with the institution that offers the most competitive pricing. It also eliminates the manual effort required for extracting and validating data from PDF as it enables automated integration of billing data into ERP, TMS, or accounting platforms. It also facilitates tax compliance and audit readiness by automating the capture of taxable amounts, tax codes, and applicable rates in multiple currencies.

Empowering the Ecosystem with SunTec Xelerate

A robust, cloud-native, and microservices-based revenue management system like SunTec Xelerate can help banks maximize the value offered by camt.086. Here’s how:

• Multi-Tiered Pricing and Tax Computation: SunTec Xelerate is built to support complex pricing models like unit pricing, tiered structures (up to 9 tiers), flat charges, minimum pricing, zone-based pricing, and threshold-based computation. It comes with a powerful Deal Management module that allows banks to create negotiated rates for customers which are automatically included in the camt.086 format. It also calculates taxes using defined tax regions, schemes, and designations and these can be presented in multiple currencies in alignment with camt 0.86 tags.
• Custom Statement Generation Based on Client Hierarchies: With Suntec Xelerate, banks can configure statements to reflect the unique customer hierarchies. It supports account and customer-level grouping that allows banks to generate a single camt.086 XML file that captures billing details for all entities within a corporate group.
• Support for Standardized Codes: SunTec Xelerate integrates Domestic AFP Service Codes and ISO 20022 Bank Transaction Codes into its Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC). These can be published directly into camt.086, EDI 822, and invoice PDFs, which simplifies inter-bank comparison, reconciliation, and reporting for corporate customers.
• Multi-Currency Conversion: SunTec Xelerate supports multi-currency accounts by enabling charges, taxes, and settlements to be expressed in different currencies. It applies exchange rates and rounding templates at the currency level to ensure error-free pricing and billing.
• Configurable Reconciliation Rules: The platform seamlessly integrates with ERP, treasury management systems, and accounting software. It generates structured camt.086 files that can be analyzed by downstream systems to match invoices with service charges, payments, and tax data. It supports reconciliation at various levels—statement, account, or service, helping corporates automate exception handling, resolve disputes, and streamline compliance reporting.

In an increasingly digital and data-driven world, it’s important for banks to modernize invoicing and billing processes as well. The camt. 086 replaces manual, error-prone statements with a structured, standardized, and transparent format that drives efficient reconciliation, seamless tax compliance, and effective cost optimization. It is important to invest in robust revenue management systems that can help organizations fully leverage this standard to ensure better control over cash flows and improve financial accuracy.