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Finance automation

Accounting and banking, connected without copy and paste.

Built around how UK and Irish finance teams work: agents move documents and payment files between your banks, your inboxes and your accounting system, in the format each one expects.

November 2026: bank files without a town are rejected

ISO 20022 · pain.001

November 2026

AIB

12 November 2026

Older bulk payment file formats are no longer processed. Files must follow AIB’s pain.001.001.09 specification.

SEPA · Bank of Ireland

22 November 2026

Only structured and hybrid postal addresses are allowed: town name and country are mandatory in every address.

Rejected · unstructured<AdrLine>Unit 4, Quay Road, Dublin 2</AdrLine>
Accepted · hybrid<TwnNm>Dublin</TwnNm> <Ctry>IE</Ctry>

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The scene in words
  1. In November 2026, Irish and European banks stop accepting payment files the way most accounting systems write them.
  2. AIB stops processing older bulk payment formats after 12 November 2026.
  3. From 22 November 2026, SEPA payments need a town and a country in every postal address. One free-text line is no longer enough.
  4. The Twinfield and Xledger exports we work with are still pain.001.001.03. Nobody re-types hundreds of supplier addresses in a week.
  5. So agents do it: they read the export, complete the addresses, and hand back a file the bank accepts.

Accounting systems, your agents, your banks

Accounting systems

Basecone
Twinfield
Xledger
Xero
Sage
Exact
QuickBooks
Cegid PHC

Your agents

  1. 01RetrieveStatements, invoices and receipts from bank portals and inboxes.
  2. 02ExtractAmounts, dates, tax IDs and references from PDFs and scans.
  3. 03ProcessMatch payments to invoices, check the books, flag exceptions.
  4. 04FileStore each document in the right folder and post the entry.

Banks · UK & Europe

Lloyds Bank
AIB
Bank of Ireland
Barclays
Santander
Revolut
NatWest
Millennium bcp

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The scene in words
  1. Your accounting system on one side: Twinfield, Xledger, Xero, Sage, Exact, QuickBooks, Cegid PHC, Basecone.
  2. Your banks on the other: Lloyds, AIB, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, Santander, Revolut, NatWest, Millennium bcp.
  3. Retrieve. Agents collect statements, invoices and receipts from bank portals, SFTP folders and inboxes.
  4. Extract. Amounts, dates, tax IDs, IBANs and references come out of PDFs, scans and XML.
  5. Process. Payments are matched to invoices, the books are checked, and anything odd is flagged for a person.
  6. File. Each document lands in the right folder and the entry is posted. Payment files go back out in the format each bank asks for.

Delivered

Case · Twinfield → AIB and Bank of Ireland

pain.001.001.09 files with hybrid addresses, for 4pointzero’s clients

Twinfield exports the old version. We built the converter that completes every supplier address and produces files AIB and Bank of Ireland accept, ahead of the November deadline.

Read the case

Case · Xledger → Lloyds Bank

From an Xledger export to Lloyds Commercial Banking Direct, over SFTP

An international foundation pays from Lloyds. Files are converted to the Lloyds pain.001.001.09 profile, PGP-encrypted, sent over SFTP, and the status reports come back on their own.

Read the case

What we automate between accounting and banks

Outgoing payments: the pain.001 credit transfer file your accounting system exports, checked, corrected and converted to the version and usage rules of your bank, then uploaded or sent over SFTP with PGP encryption.

Incoming responses: pain.002 payment status reports, matched back to the payments they answer, and bank statements (camt.053 or MT940) collected for reconciliation.

Documents: statements, invoices and receipts retrieved from portals and inboxes, read, matched and filed in the accounting system with the entry posted.

What is a pain.001 file?

pain.001 is the ISO 20022 XML message a company sends its bank to start credit transfers. One file carries a batch of payments: who pays, who is paid, the IBANs, the amounts and the execution date. Accounting and ERP systems such as Twinfield and Xledger export it, and the finance team uploads it to the bank or sends it over SFTP.

The bank checks the file against the ISO schema (XSD) and against its own usage guidelines before it pays. A file that fails either check is rejected as a whole or payment by payment.

pain.001.001.03 and pain.001.001.09

pain.001.001.03 is the 2009 version of the message, and it is still what most accounting systems export. pain.001.001.09 is the 2019 version, which the European Payments Council adopted for SEPA in November 2023. It adds structured address elements, the LEI and a few other fields, and some elements move or change name.

Converting is not a find-and-replace on the namespace. The group header, the execution date format, the address and the bank-specific identifiers all change, and every bank publishes its own rules on top of the standard.

Structured, hybrid and unstructured addresses

An unstructured address is free text: “Unit 4, Quay Road, Dublin 2” in one or two AdrLine elements, plus the country. From November 2026 this form is rejected.

A structured address uses separate elements only: street (StrtNm), building number, post code, town (TwnNm), country (Ctry). A hybrid address keeps up to two AdrLine elements, but the town and the country must be there as separate elements. Hybrid is the practical route for files exported from an accounting system, because the street can stay as it was typed.

Questions finance teams ask

What changes for bank payment files in November 2026?

AIB stops processing older bulk payment formats after 12 November 2026, and from 22 November 2026 SEPA payments must carry a structured or hybrid postal address: the town and the country as separate elements. A pain.001 file whose addresses are only free-text lines is rejected.

Do we have to change our accounting system?

No. The agents work from the file your accounting system already exports. They complete what is missing, convert it to the bank’s version and rules, and you upload or send the result as before.

Which accounting systems and banks do you work with?

We have delivered Twinfield to AIB and Bank of Ireland, and Xledger to Lloyds Bank. The same approach applies to Xero, Sage, Exact, QuickBooks, Cegid PHC and Basecone on one side and Barclays, NatWest, Santander, Revolut or Millennium bcp on the other: every bank publishes usage guidelines on top of ISO 20022, and we build a profile for each.

Is our payment data safe?

Each build keeps payment data inside the client’s perimeter. In the AIB and Bank of Ireland converter, files are encrypted at rest and deleted after 90 days, and sign-in is by one-time code with an optional IP allowlist. In the Lloyds bridge, conversion runs in the browser and files leave only PGP-encrypted, over SFTP, from a fixed address the bank allowlists.

How long does a build take?

The AIB and Bank of Ireland converter went from design to the first client’s test files in one week, in October 2026. Adding a bank profile to an existing converter is smaller work; most of the time goes into the bank’s own test environment.

Can the agents also bring statements and payment statuses back?

Yes. The Lloyds bridge pulls pain.002 status reports and statements from the bank’s outbound folder every few minutes, and matches each status to the payment it answers.

Which bank and which accounting system?