Straight-through processing (STP)

Roles that need it

• Payments Operations Analyst
• Payments Messaging Specialist (SWIFT)
• Process Analyst (Banking)
• Settlements Analyst
• Treasury Operations Analyst

Skills it belongs to

• Payment systems and messaging (SWIFT, ISO 20022, SEPA, ACH, UPI)
• Settlement and fails management
• Defining and using KPIs

Related concepts

• Payment repairPayment repair is the manual or rule-based correction of a payment that cannot be processed automatically, for example because of a missing or invalid IBAN, BIC, name or address. Banks often charge a repair fee, and the share of payments needing repair is a measure of data quality and of straight-through processing.
• ISO 20022ISO 20022 is the international standard for financial messages, built from a common business dictionary and usually expressed in XML. Payment messages are grouped as pain (customer to bank), pacs (bank to bank) and camt (cash management, such as statements). It is the format of SEPA, T2, CHAPS and Swift cross-border payments.
• Remittance informationRemittance information is the data in a payment that tells the payee what the payment is for, such as invoice numbers. It can be unstructured free text (140 characters in SEPA) or structured, such as a creditor reference under ISO 11649 starting with RF. Good remittance data lets the payee match payments to invoices automatically.
• Structured postal addressA structured postal address in ISO 20022 places each part of an address in its own field, such as street name, building number, post code, town name and country. The hybrid format allows some free text but requires town and country in their own fields. Swift planned to reject unstructured addresses in cross-border payments from November 2026 and then agreed to extend the migration.

Sources

• CPMI glossary, Bank for International Settlements (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026
• ISO 20022 official website (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026

Updated 31 Oct 2026.