Comment by evrimoztamur

That's definitely the 'retro' way of doing it, and has been effectively outlawed in Europe with the new banking file and payment standards laws.

It's rather hilarious, one of the major banks I had a conversation with back in 2019 (as these new laws were barely getting off the ground in tech implementation) noted that they had a service which allowed you to drop in raw SWIFT messages (interbank commmunication format) into a folder via SFTP to make payments in bulk or download bank statements. It's very real!

I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot of big firms grandfathered into that, and may be still (unlawfully?) offering it.