Intesa Sanpaolo SEPA XML Guide: Why Accented Italian Characters Get Rewritten

Italy's legacy CBI (Corporate Banking Interbancario) infrastructure predates ISO 20022's UTF-8-friendly design, and some Italian bank-side systems still choke on accented characters even inside a technically valid UTF-8 XML file. The Intesa Sanpaolo profile works around this by rewriting accented characters before they reach the XML, rather than leaving that risk in your file.

What the implemented Intesa Sanpaolo profile writes and checks

What "legacy Italian" sanitization actually rewrites

The conversion is character-by-character, not a transliteration library: à/á/â/ã/ä/å → a, è/é/ê/ë → e, ì/í/î/ï → i, ò/ó/ô/õ/ö → o, ù/ú/û/ü → u, plus the uppercase equivalents, ñ/Ñ → n/N, and ç/Ç → c/C. This means a creditor name like "Città di Perù S.r.l." is written to the XML as "Citta di Peru S.r.l." — expected behavior for this profile, not a bug in your spreadsheet.

When this matters for your data

• Legal entity names. If a counterparty's registered name contains an accented letter, the generated XML will not match the accented form character-for-character. This is a deliberate compatibility choice for the Intesa Sanpaolo channel, not a rendering issue.
• Remittance text. The same substitution applies to unstructured remittance information — an invoice description with Italian accents will come through de-accented.
• Not applied elsewhere. This sanitization only runs for profiles configured with strictSanitization: 'ITALIAN_LEGACY' — it does not affect files generated for other banks.

Prepare Excel without creating a repair queue

1. Expect accented Italian characters in names and remittance text to be normalized — don't treat the de-accented output as a data-entry mistake to fix upstream.
2. If you need the accented form preserved somewhere (e.g. your own accounting records), keep a separate copy of the source spreadsheet — the sanitization only affects the generated XML.
3. Select Intesa Sanpaolo when generating so the sanitization is applied consistently across the whole file.