The range of available transactions to be managed and to be initiated has been expanded with the payment request transaction in the Electra system specified by the National Bank of Hungary.
Simultaneously with the launch of the National Instant Payment System on March 2, it became possible for Hungarian banks to provide payment request service in Hungarian Forint to their customers. On the contrary to the sending and receiving instant payment orders, the relevant national regulations didn’t make Request to Pay (RtP) service as mandatory for Hungarian banks. Most banks are starting to develop it in the months ahead.
In accordance with the admitted banking needs we have developed the new order type and its additional functions in the Electra system.
A payment request is a standardized transaction order without any cash movement that can be sent by the initiator of the request to the payer. If the received request is accepted and approved by the paying party, they can initiate an immediate transfer in response to the Forint amount indicated in the request. In the request, the payer receives all the data necessary to initiate the transfer through the National Instant Payment System. This allows the recipient of the funds to create a new transfer order with virtually a single approval move.
As payment requests are also subject to the 365/7/24 availability introduced in the instant payment system and the 5-second transmission rule, payment initiatives initiated with a payment request can also be executed at any time throughout the year.
RtP orders can only be sent to accounts maintained at banks or initiated from accounts that have joined the payment request service of GIRO Ltd., the operator of the central infrastructure of the IP transactions’ clearing. The list of participating banks is published in the updated bulletin of the Clearing House monthly.
The operations related to the payment request can be handled by the users of the Electra system with the required authorization. In addition to the mandatory content elements of the HCT Inst transaction, the message also contains the payment deadline specified by the Initiator, the validity period of the payment request (according to the regulation it can be up to 2 months) as well as the tag whether the amount to be paid can be a subject to change or can’t.
A payment request may also be submitted to the account service provider by including the secondary account identifier assigned to the payer’s payment account instead of the payer’s name and IBAN number in the data required to initiate a payment order.
A RtP order can be initiated on Electra UI in the same way as regular orders. Accordingly, when initiating an order, Electra performs the verification of the mandatory fields, ensuring that the secondary account IDs can also be indicated and the syntactic checks related to them.
In compliance with the measurability provisions of the settlement deadlines ruled by the Decree on Payment Services Electra system places a precise time stamp with the accuracy of milliseconds on the created orders based on the system-time provided by the bank.
Payment requests on Electra UI can be:
- initiated – as a new type of order,
- verified – according to the specific banking rules and their compliance with legal regulations,
- sent to the banking back ends – after checking the related set of authorization rights,
- answered by the payer – by automatically creating an immediate payment order (leaving the amount specified in the request unchanged or changing it),
- revoked by the initiating party, if it hasn’t been already answered by the paying party,
- rejected by the payer,
- queried by account holders according to the different status messages provided by the bank.
The Electra system ensures the receipt of bulk of payment requests and their transmission to the back ends.
Based on the status messages sent by the banking processing systems to Electra, the user interfaces can display real-time intimation on the fact that payment requests have been delivered, accepted or rejected to account-holding customers.
With the new query feature developed in the Electra Internet Banking, Electra Client Program and Electra Mobile App user interfaces, users can retrieve their active or pending payment requests, which have been previously sent or received by the account holder.
Photo: European payments council