BAI2 (Bank Administration Institute Format 2)
BAI2A fixed-width text format published by the Bank Administration Institute for transmitting cash management balance and transaction data from banks to corporate customers.
BAI2 is the dominant cash-management file format used by US and many global banks to deliver previous-day and intraday balance and transaction data to corporate treasuries. The format is line-oriented: each line begins with a numeric record-type code (01 file header, 02 group header, 03 account identifier, 16 transaction detail, 49/98/99 trailers) followed by comma-separated fields.
Its enduring appeal is mechanical simplicity. A treasurer can open a BAI2 file in a text editor and read every transaction; a parser can be written in a few hundred lines. Its weakness is the same — there is no concept of structured remittance information beyond a free-text 88 continuation record, so matching incoming wires to invoices typically requires fuzzy parsing of unstructured text.
Modern reconciliation platforms either ingest BAI2 directly or convert it into a richer internal representation alongside MT940 and ISO 20022 camt.053. Where BAI2 leaves remittance ambiguity, probabilistic matching and entity-resolution layers compensate.