The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has issued guidelines for drawing up a contract or agreement between a bank and customer, to include the bank payment obligation (BPO). The guidelines suggest a list of categories, and the individual components within those categories, that should be considered when drafting a customer contract or agreement.

The publication of the guidelines – on 20 August 2015 – follows a request made by a number of banks to the ICC.

According to a statement of the ICC's website, an appendix to the document contains a list of bank financing product and service descriptions that were drafted by SWIFT in May 2009 for the Trade Services Utility (TSU) documentation. It states: “This list is by no means fully encompassing or comprehensive, may contain concepts and terms that are not uniformly used worldwide, and is offered solely for guidance.”

The organisation also states that the newly published version of the guidelines are based on a previous draft text, which has been reviewed by the ICC Banking Commission Legal Committee, the comments of which are incorporated into this final version.

André Casterman, global head of corporate and supply chain markets at Swift, told GTR magazine: “The [existing] BPO rules cover the bank-to-bank space, and not the corporate-to-bank space. The document... provides that kind of guidance: what kind of clauses they should add into their contracts, how to insert particular BPO-based services (risk mitigation, financing, etc), aspects they need to consider, etc. We hope this will accelerate the bank readiness for BPO.”

The guidelines can be downloaded from the ICC website.