Icon Standard
The Icon Standard is designed to simplify how clients integrate their payment flows with the various scheme packs offered by Icon for external payment scheme connectivity. By following the Icon Standard, clients can build payment messages and flows that are scheme-agnostic — the same message format can be sent to any supported scheme pack without the client needing to understand or manage scheme-specific requirements. All scheme-specific mapping and enrichment will be handled by the scheme pack itself.
This approach enables scheme packs to be interchangeable with minimal development effort.
| The goal: Clients can build flows once, without worrying about the underlying payment scheme. Icon handles the complexity — so you don’t have to. |
Enabling the Icon Standard
To use the Icon Standard, clients simply set a global flag in the IPF configuration (Estándar de Iconos Mapping). This informs all scheme packs that messages it processes from flows should be treated as standardised and may require enrichment and messages from schemes should be updated to make them fit the standard. No other technical changes are required.
Although you can still use the full ISO20022 XSD for payment messages in your flows, you only need to populate the fields specified in the Icon Standard. When passing these messages to the scheme packs, validation of unused fields will not be enforced, allowing greater flexibility during integration.
Outbound Messages
pacs.008 (Client as Debtor)
When a flow is sending pacs.008 messages under the Icon Standard, the message contains no scheme-specific data. All relevant data should be included at the transaction level, not in the message header.
Even when targeting bulk-based payment schemes (e.g. SEPA Credit Transfer), each pacs.008 message under the Icon Standard represents a single payment. The client does not need to adapt to scheme-specific batch structures.
| Scheme-specific data here means flows don’t need to know things like whether to put interbank settlement date in the header or the transaction based on the destination CSM. If you need to do something like provide scheme-specific remittance information (e.g. QR reference in Swiss payments), or data relating to an AOS in SEPA this can be provided as part of the Icon Standard message. |
Inbound
pacs.008 (Client as Creditor)
When a flow receives a pacs.008 message using the Icon Standard, all data from the scheme will be passed to the client. If any fields used by the scheme are outside of the recommended Icon Standard fields, those data elements will be copied into the appropriate standard fields.
This ensures that flows built according to the Icon Standard can access key data without needing to understand the structure or mapping of a specific scheme.
Response codes
All payment schemes currently supported by IPF return response codes in either ISO20022 format or as proprietary codes.
When the Icon Standard is enabled:
-
Proprietary scheme-specific response codes in pacs.002 messages are mapped to standardised Icon response codes (or ISO20022 format codes)
-
Note: where the payment schemes return response codes in ISO20022 format, then these are passed through as is (there is no mapping).
-
-
This allows clients to process responses uniformly, regardless of scheme
-
Original scheme responses are moved into accompanying business data should the client require them.