Swiss QR-bill

The Swiss QR-bill replaced the Swiss orange and red inpayment slips in July 2020. It's an ISO 20022 Customer Credit Transfer Initiation (pain.001) payload rendered as a QR with a mandatory Swiss-cross overlay in the centre. Every Swiss bank accepts it; no Swiss bank accepts anything else.

Canonical spec: SIX Swiss Implementation Guidelines for the QR-bill v2.3 (2024-04).
ISO basis: ISO 20022 pain.001 Customer Credit Transfer Initiation.
Mandatory since: 1 July 2020. Legacy orange/red inpayment slips phased out 30 September 2022.

What it is

The payload is a newline-separated (CRLF) list of 32 fields arranged in seven blocks:

QRType         → Always "SPC"
Version        → 0200 (v2.3)
Coding         → 1 (Latin-1)
[Creditor Information]         ← 7 fields (IBAN + address)
[Ultimate Creditor]            ← 7 fields (optional, usually empty)
[Payment Amount Information]   ← 3 fields (amount, currency, due date)
[Ultimate Debtor]              ← 7 fields (optional)
[Payment Reference]            ← 2 fields (reference type + reference)
[Additional Information]       ← 2 fields (unstructured message + bill info)
[Alternative Procedures]       ← 2 fields (optional, rarely used)

The resulting QR sits inside a "Payment part" block on the bottom third of the invoice. Every Swiss banking app (UBS, ZKB, PostFinance, Raiffeisen, Neon, Yuh, Revolut CH) reads it natively.

QR-IBAN vs regular IBAN

A "QR-IBAN" is a special Swiss IBAN where the 5-digit bank code range is 30000–31999. QR-IBANs require a structured QR reference (QRR, 27 digits, mod-10 check). Regular Swiss IBANs accept creditor reference (SCOR, RFC 8905) or no reference.

Creditor IBAN type	Valid reference types	Notes
QR-IBAN (bank code 30000–31999)	QRR (27-digit, mod-10)	Required. SCOR and NON are invalid.
Regular IBAN (CH or LI)	SCOR or NON	QRR is invalid — QR-IBAN only.

Canonical test vectors

Case	Inputs	Reference type
Minimal (regular IBAN, no amount, no reference)	`iban=CH9300762011623852957 name=Acme AG street=Bahnhofstrasse 1 postal=8001 city=Zürich country=CH`	NON
Regular IBAN with amount + unstructured message	(same as above) `amount=100.00 message=Invoice 1234`	NON
QR-IBAN with QRR reference	`iban=CH4431999123000889012 name=Acme AG street=Bahnhofstrasse 1 postal=8001 city=Zürich country=CH amount=250.00 reference=210000000003139471430009017`	QRR
Liechtenstein IBAN	`iban=LI0508800000021904015 name=Beispiel AG city=Vaduz country=LI`	NON

Live Swiss IBAN validator

The validator below checks the three Swiss-specific rules: (1) country code is CH or LI, (2) length is exactly 21, (3) ISO 7064 mod-97 checksum passes. Pasted input is normalised (case, spaces stripped).

Swiss or Liechtenstein IBAN

Enter a CH or LI IBAN to validate.

Common pitfalls

Wrong reference type for the IBAN type. A QR-IBAN with a NON or SCOR reference is rejected at the bank. A regular IBAN with a QRR reference is also rejected. Abundera auto-selects the right type; hand-built encoders often get this wrong.
Missing Swiss-cross overlay. The QR-bill spec requires a 7mm × 7mm Swiss flag (white cross on red, with a 1mm white border) centred on the QR. This is not optional — banking OCR pipelines use it as a QR-bill signature. Abundera overlays it automatically.
QR module error correction level. The spec requires ECC level M. Higher or lower ECC levels render a QR that looks right but rejects at the bank.
Address field length. Creditor name, street, postal, city — each capped at 70 Latin-1 characters. Over-length strings get silently truncated by some encoders, which breaks reconciliation.
Currency CHF or EUR only. The QR-bill supports only two currencies. Every other currency is rejected.
Reference mod-10 vs mod-97. QRR references use a mod-10 recursive checksum (Luhn-variant). Not to be confused with the mod-97 IBAN checksum. Hand-rolled reference generators often Luhn-check the wrong way.
Latin-1, not UTF-8. Field Coding is "1" = Latin-1. Non-Latin-1 characters (ä/ö/ü survive; Cyrillic/Chinese don't) break some older banking apps.

Scanner compatibility

Reader	Support	Notes
UBS Mobile / PostFinance / ZKB app	Native	Every Swiss banking app reads QR-bills natively.
Neon / Yuh / Revolut CH	Native	Neobanks handle the full pain.001 payload.
iOS Camera	No	iOS treats a QR-bill as a raw string — no parsing. User must open a banking app.
Android Camera / Google Lens	No	Same — no native parsing.
Commercial OCR (e.g. bill-pay services)	Yes	Banking-grade OCR tooling reads QR-bills into AP/AR pipelines.