pain.001
The ISO 20022 message a company sends its bank to request outgoing payments, usually hundreds of invoices in a single file.
Its full name is CustomerCreditTransferInitiation, and the pain prefix stands for payments initiation rather than the experience of implementing it. The file is three layers of XML: a group header with a count and control sum, one or more PmtInf blocks carrying the debit account and execution date, and beneath those the individual payments with amount, creditor and reference. The bank answers with a pain.002 saying what it accepted and what it bounced.
Version pain.001.001.03 from 2009 hung on for more than a decade, and the SEPA rulebooks only moved to the 2019 version in November 2023. Files travel over EBICS, host-to-host links or Swift. In Sweden the format is gradually replacing Bankgirot's home-grown supplier payment files, and once inside the interbank space the same payment carries on as a pacs.008.