Charge bearer

We generally only supported outgoing payments via the BC Connect API with the 'SHA' charge bearer, which indicates that charges are split between sender and beneficiary.

You can instruct other types of charges bearers, such as OUR and BEN, as part of the payment instruction.

Please note that a Charge OUR payment will be applied as a separate fee along with your agreed transaction fee for the payment method if applied.

Instructing the charge bearer

For single, bulk and agency/correspondent banking payment initiation endpoints, you can instruct payments using below charge bearer values:

Charge bearer code	Description
BEN	All transaction charges are to be borne by the beneficiary customer.
OUR	All transaction charges are to be borne by the ordering customer.
SHA	All transaction charges other than the charges of the financial institution servicing the ordering customer account are borne by the beneficiary customer.

For payment initiations using the pain.001 endpoint, you can instruct payment using below charge bearer values:

Charge bearer code	Description
CRED	All transaction charges are to be borne by the creditor.
DEBT	All transaction charges are to be borne by the debtor.
SHAR	For credit transfers: The transaction charges on the sender side are to be borne by the debtor, and transaction charges on the receiver side are to be borne by the creditor. For direct debits: The transaction charges on the sender side are to be borne by the creditor, and transaction charges on the receiver side are to be borne by the debtor.
SLEV	Charges are to be applied following the rules agreed in the service level and/or scheme. Typically equivalent to SHA/SHAR.

BC Connect will either carry the instructed charge bearer value forward, or overwrite the value, before executing the payment. This depends on your “charge bearer setup”, and the payment rail that the payment is executed via.

As an example, the SEPA Credit Transfer scheme does not allow any other charge bearer than “SHA”. If you instruct a payment with charge bearer “OUR”, but BC Connect’s routing logic determines that the payment should be executed via SEPA Credit Transfer, then the charge bearer value “OUR” will automatically be overwritten with “SHA”.

Therefore, a distinction is made between the “instructed charge bearer” (the charge bearer specified in the payment instruction) and the “actual charge bearer” (the charge bearer on the executed payment).

You can retrieve the instructed charge bearer and the actual charge bearer via the Get /api/v1/payments/singles and in the reconciliation reports, under the properties instructedChargeBearer and chargeBearer. As long as the payment status is ‘Pending processing’, the chargeBearer value will be same as instructedChargeBearer.

Details and activation

Please contact our Client Services for more details and activation.