Choice of payment instrument and submission of the payment instruction:
Depending on the payment instrument chosen (see Section 1.4), the payer or
payee submits a payment instruction to its bank. Payments are increasingly being
initiated electronically, using standardised formats (including, for example, the
bank account number of the recipient and the Bank Identifier Code (BIC) of
the recipient’s bank). This makes it possible for the banks to process payments
without manual intervention using straight-through processing (STP).