Amid hectic work to get TypePad's Dutch version completed, I've been looking at alternate payment methods to offer in Belgium and the Netherlands, besides credit cards.
In Belgium, it seems, it is possible to add an OGM number as message to a bank transfer. This is a specially formatted number that is associated with an invoice. This means that a big organisation that has to send out a lot of invoices probably just generates a bunch of these numbers, assigns them to the various bills and when the payments come in it is just a question of automatically linking the numbers in the bank statements to the various invoices to keep track of who paid and who didn't.
And the number itself seems to consist of ten digits followed by a two digit security code consisting of the modulo 97 of the first ten digits. At least that's what some website I came accros said.
So far, this solution seems perfect for TypePad: we generate a number whenever a bill needs paying, and the user puts this number on a bank transfer statement. We then get a nice list from the bank with the numbers of all paid bills, and act accordingly. The only question is, in what format can we get bank statements? XML would be nice, but CSV or plain text would do nicely too. Paper is no option, unfortunately.
Anybody here with practical experience of this system? I'm looking for all available info, all hints or tips appreciated...
