A heavily debated query was approved at the November 2015 ICC Banking Commission meeting after having gone through a number of iterations over the preceding months. The resultant opinion, TA.814rev4, related to the identification of the currency in an invoice.
A credit was issued indicating the currency as ‘USD'. The presented invoice, instead of stating ‘USD', indicated the currency by means of the dollar (‘$') sign. Whilst this was considered to be acceptable by the nominated bank, the issuing bank refused the documents on the grounds that the actual currency was not specified. A second discrepancy was raised in respect of the transport document being wrongly consigned but that is not the subject of this blog.
The nominated bank argued that the ‘$' sign was an internationally recognised, and frequently used, sign for denoting the US Dollar and did, in fact, specify the currency correctly. Payment was, ultimately, received from the issuing bank but only after the deduction of a discrepancy fee.
As mentioned in the analysis to this opinion, both UCP 600, within sub-article 18 (a) (iii), and ISBP 745, in paragraph C6 (c), specifies that an invoice must be in the same currency as the credit.
It was determined that, in respect of a credit issued in ‘USD', any presented invoice that stated ‘$' without further qualification, would satisfy the above sub-article. The only exception would be if the invoice, or any other presented document, included data that implied the "$' sign could refer to a currency other than ‘USD'. This could embrace, for instance, an indication that the beneficiary was domiciled in a country whose currency is commonly referred to with the ‘$' sign e.g., Australia, Canada, Singapore, etc.